Much Ado (Varigo 16)

Much Ado About Nothing

The penultimate section focuses on the original texts and the choices made in generating the text of this edition. Only one of these pairs, however - Hero and Claudio - has what is conventionally considered a literary source, in the sense of a storyline already available elsewhere at the time of the play's composition. Traditional thinking about this play's debt to source material has thus tended to identify the Beatrice and Benedick material, as well as the Watch, as Shakespeare's original inventions, grafted on as comic relief to the oft-told backbone story of the slandered woman and her deceived betrothed.

This vision of the play's relation to its sources locates the divergent natures of the two different love plots in their respective origins: Hero and Claudio's pairing, based on pre-existing narratives, represents 'conventional' romance, whereas the unprecedented Beatrice and Benedick plot represents something more unusual in both style and substance, a product of Shakespeare's genius, his comment on convention itself. This discrimination usually comes with the reminder that the Hero-Claudio plot is the 'main' plot, and the other, despite its tendency to upstage it, the mere subplot.

On the other hand, revisions of this account of origins and originalities point out that, despite the apparent autonomy of the Beatrice and Benedick plot from the story of the slandered woman, both plots, in fact, turn on staged scenes and on fabricated accounts of love of Don Pedro for Hero, Hero for Borachio, or Benedick for Beatrice, and she for him. Thus in this light the Benedick and Beatrice plot also derives from the calumny material.

This remains nonetheless a plot-derived account of literary indebtedness, with Shakespeare doubling the offerings of his source much as The Comedy of Errors multiplies Plautus' one set of twins in order to multiply comic possibilities. Ariosto and Bandello The plot-centred notion of a source gets us far with this play. The tale of the unjustly slandered woman was indeed a popular one in Renaissance literature see Bullough. It appeared in many genres - tragedy, farce, romance and homily - and served as a vehicle for various meditations: Sexual slander was also a real concern of sixteenth-century courts see Sharpe; Kaplan, Culture.

The story's most ancient analogue was the fifth-century Greek romance of Chariton, Chaereas and Kallirrhoe, although more recent renditions lay behind Shakespeare's. Of these there were at least seventeen versions both narrative and dramatic extant at the time of the composition of Much Ado.

Ariosto sets the story in question, an episode in his larger romance, in Scotland, and recounts it from the perspective of the lady's maid Dalinda analogous to the figure of Shakespeare's Margaret , who relates her own misguided part in the proceedings. Dalinda is a lover of the knight Polynesso, Duke of Alban. He in turn wishes to marry her mistress Genevra, daughter of the Scottish king, 'Because of her great state and hie condition', although he promises to love Dalinda still: He persuades Dalinda to make his suit to her mistress on his behalf, and when it is spurned - Genevra unwaveringly loves the Italian knight Ariodante Polynesso wishes to revenge himself upon her.

Polynesso asks Dalinda to make love to him in her mistress's clothing and hairstyle, under the pretext that it will serve as a therapeutic exorcism of his love for Genevra 'Thus I may passe my fancies foolish fit' , but really of course to deceive Ariodante Dalinda 5 Introduction agrees, not knowing the true audience of her actions, and eager to resecure Polynesso's undivided attentions no matter how peculiar the means.

Ariodante, when confronted with Polynesso's claim to having enjoyed Genevra's 'yvorie corps' However, while fearful for his life from one he intuits is 'this false Duke' Lurcanio dissuades Ariodante from suicide, and the latter departs the Scottish court and is soon reputed drowned. The brother subsequently accuses Genevra of unchastity and culpability for Ariodante's death.

Though Genevra's father, the King of Scotland, attempts to get to the bottom of the matter by interviewing her maids an action which prompts Dalinda to warn Polynesso , he is nonetheless bound by Scottish law to sentence his daughter to death, unless a champion appears who can kill her accuser in a trial by combat, and thus prove her innocence. Polynesso packs off Dalinda to one of his castles or so she thinks , with instructions to his men to murder her en route, a plight from which she is rescued by the knight Rinaldo, the principal hero of Ariosto's romance, now journeying through Scotland.

She tells Rinaldo her tale, and he speeds to the court of Saint Andrews in time to prevent the combat between Lurcanio and an unknown knight, who, it turns out, is Ariodante in disguise.

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The lover had thought better of drowning himself, and decided to fight for his lady's honour even though he believed her guilty and the combat was against his own brother. All is revealed; Rinaldo slays Polynesso, the lovers are united, and Dalinda heads for a nunnery. Ariosto's tale produced many spin-offs. It was first translated into English by Peter Beverly in , and his History ofAriodanto and Genevra seizes upon the story as a frame on which to hang much poetry on the varieties and miseries of lovesickness.

George Whetstone's Rock of Regardrendered it in his hero is Rinaldo, 6 Introduction his heroine Giletta, and the villain, also a rival lover, Frizaldo. By this time the story had acquired an exemplary force, and Harington's moral is multiple: Edmund Spenser also found the story of homiletic utility, and in Book 2 canto 4 of The Faerie Queene he uses it to illustrate the dangers of intemperate action. Phedon, the lover figure, is tricked by his so-called friend Philemon into thinking his lady Claribell false to him 'with a groome of base degree' Philemon's motives are vague: Phedon witnesses their embrace and, 'chawing vengeance all the way' When Guyon, knight of Temperance, finds him, he is being tortured by Furor and his mother Occasion, and serves up his tale as a warning against lack of moderation.

Spenser's is the only version of the story in which the heroine dies. The story also provided matter for drama, although the tenor of the plays is more farcical and less didactic than the poetic accounts narrative accounts being better equipped than drama to provide opportunity for homily. Fedele loves Vittoria, who, although married to Cornelio, loves a man named Fortunio. Fedele discloses the latter information to the cuckolded Cornelio, and arranges for him to see a servant in love with Vittoria's maid enter the house to court an alleged Vittoria.

The incensed Cornelio plans to poison his wife, but she by a trick escapes her fate. Bandello's story, like Shakespeare's, is set in Messina, where the knightly and very wealthy Sir Timbreo de Cardona is a courtier of King Piero of Aragon, the latter having taken possession of the island in the wake of a Sicilian rebellion against the occupying French there is virtually no mention of King Piero, however. During the courtly victory celebrations, Sir Timbreo falls in love with one Fenicia, daughter of an impoverished but ancient family.

Her father is Messer Lionato de' Lionati. The alliance is received happily by the entire town, chiefly on account of the universal regard in which Messer Lionato is held, 'since [he] was a gentleman rightly loved as one who sought to hurt nobody but to help all as much as he could' The only person disappointed by the match is one Sir Girondo Olerio Valenziano, who also loves Fenicia. Sir Girondo is also a proven soldier and ornament of the court, and comrade to Sir Timbreo though curiously not in his confidence on the amorous score.

Stricken by lovesickness and disappointment at the news of Fenicia's betrothal, Sir Girondo 'allowed himself to be carried away into doing an action blameworthy in anyone, let alone in a knight and gentleman such as he was' He plots to destroy the match so as to gain Fenicia's hand for himself, and confides his desire to another courtier 'whom [he] had for confidant and helper in his crime.

This henchman goes to Sir Timbreo, relates the tale of Fenicia's duplicity, and makes an appointment to witness it. The hour arrived, Sir Girondo suborns one of his servingmen having 'perfumed him with the sweetest of scents', to enter, by ladder, a wing of Messer Lionato's house. The three pass by the hiding place of Sir Timbreo, where the fragrant servingman to further increase plausibility audibly cautions the others to take care of the ladder's placement, 'for the last time we were here my lady Fenicia told me that you had leaned it there with too much noise' The man then climbs onto the balcony and purposefully enters the house 'as if he had a mistress within' On the morrow the disappointed Sir Timbreo discreetly sends word by messenger to Messer Lionato that he will not, after all, have his daughter, and 'that you should find another son-in-law.

He instructs 9 Introduction Fenicia to 'find yourself another husband, just as you have already found yourself another lover. Sir Timbreo does not intend to have anything more to do with you, since you will make anyone who marries you a Lord of Corneto' Messer Lionato, however, doughtily tells the messenger he is not surprised: I always feared, from the first moment when you spoke to me of this marriage, that Sir Timbreo would not stand firm to his request, for I knew then as I do now that I am only a poor gentleman and not his equal.

Yet surely if he repented of his promise to make her his wife it would have been sufficient for him to declare that he did not want her, and not to have laid against her this injurious accusation of whoredom. It is indeed true that all things are possible, but I know how my daughter has been reared and what her habits are.

The ever-virtuous Fenicia, from her sickbed, and surrounded by sympathetic friends and relatives, claims that Sir Timbreo's reversal was a providential means of preserving her from the arrogance which might have followed upon such a grand match. She then falls into a coma, is believed dead, is awakened as she is laid out for burial by her mother, and is dispatched by her ever-resourceful father to his brother's house in the country, 'so that after Fenicia had grown up and changed her appearance, as is usual with age, he might marry her off in two or three years under another name' Her funeral proceeds as scheduled, provoking a universal sympathy, for 'all the citizens firmly believed that Don Timbreo had invented the lie about her' The latter, meanwhile, surrounded by such adverse public opinion, 'began to feel great sorrow and a heartstirring such as he would never have thought possible' Weighing the sum of the evidence the remoteness of her bedroom from the entered balcony, her bedfellow sister, the location of her parents' bedchamber , it occurs to him that there 10 Introduction might well have been other reasons for what he witnessed: However, the greatest impact of Fenicia's funeral is upon Sir Girondo, who has become virtually suicidal not only for the loss of his beloved but for his dishonour in having been a cause of such harm.

His contrition provides for the discovery of the deception. Consequently, a week after the funeral he confesses his sins to Sir Timbreo, and before her supposed tomb offers him both his poniard and his bared breast. Not to be outdone in chivalry, Sir Timbreo cites his own over-credulity as equally culpable, and the two men decide to clear Fenicia's name Sir Timbreo only scolds Sir Girondo for not having disclosed his love to him, claiming that he would have 'preferred our friendship to my desire', The repentant duo repair to Messer Lionato, who secures Sir Timbreo's promise to wed a woman of the latter's choosing.

A year later Sir Timbreo willingly weds the much-improved Fenicia, who, like the phoenix after whom she is named, has been reborn through her trial. Sir Timbreo discovers her true identity before the marriage, but only after he recounts his love for the dead Fenicia. Sir Girondo weds her sister. The social universe of Bandello's novella is certainly the more akin to Shakespeare's Messina.

Rather than court intrigue or the accidental landscapes of romance, he chooses to set his story in the gossipy confines of a leisured household in 1 For a fuller treatment of the differences of play and source, see McEachern, 'Fathering'. This sense of a provincial if aristocratic identity extends to the incongruously home-grown quality of Dogberry and his men who, with their ostentatiously English names, may lend a comforting and plebeian familiarity to Messinese society, Messina being as remote as the moon to the majority of Shakespeare's audience.

This sense of social proximity also accounts for the Watch's knowledge of and attention to their neighbour's doings 'I pray you watch about Signor Leonato's door, for the wedding being there tomorrow, there is a great coil tonight', 3. Shakespeare's portrait of communal and quotidian life - also conveyed by such details as the passing mention of Claudio's uncle 1. At the same time, the play's social universe, with its visiting dignitaries and fashionable speech, is not exclusively a provincial one.

Shakespeare's debt to Ariosto is a different one.

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If the exotic vistas, noble questants and providential accidents of romance are gone, to be replaced by the hothouse intimacies of small-town life 12 Introduction Rinaldo has become a householder with two gowns , Shakespeare retains Ariosto's chivalric register in the forms of Benedick's challenge to Claudio, as well as in Leonato's and Antonio's similar moves to defend Hero's honour. Perhaps the strongest link of Shakespeare's play to the Ariostan version of the tale lies not so much in plot as in social custom, in his concern with the romance's attention to social distinctions.

This is embedded in Shakespeare's response to the role of the maid Dalinda. She provides Shakespeare, in her tale of dressing in her mistress's clothes, with the sartorial means of the deception. Shakespeare then elaborates the social circumstances that condition Dalinda's own curiously abject role in Genevra's slander into an entire sociological climate in which rank and name are both subtle but crucial factors in determining the slander of Hero. The maid There is in Ariosto a clear sense of the social requirements of marital union. Dalinda's station is far below that of the Duke Polynesso, even if we read her as a lady-in-waiting rather than a mere maid; in any case, she acknowledges the greater allure of her mistress's social position: Not all of love, but partly of ambition, He beares in hand his minde is onely bent, Because of her great state and hie condition, To have her for his wife is his intent: He nothing doubteth of the kings permission, Had he obtained Genevras free assent.

Ne was it hard for him to take in hand, That was the second person in the land. In Shakespeare's play, this emphasis on clothes and station provides the means and the rationale of Margaret's participation in the charade. Shakespeare sketches a character who like Dalinda is aware of her own relative lack of social status amongst the company: She prides herself on her wit 'Doth not my wit become me rarely? The deception at the window, in which Margaret wears Hero's garments, and, in Borachio's words, 'leans me out at her mistress' chamber window, bids me a thousand times goodnight' 3.

Borachio has prepared his audience to see Hero making sport of her suit to Claudio by calling her lover Borachio by Claudio's name: But she is not innocent of social ambition, or at least a certain wistfulness about her inferior social station, enough so that we are asked to imagine that the game of mocking her betters is a plausible and pleasurable one for her to play. The role of 14 Introduction rank is present from the opening lines of the play: Much of this attention to status revolves around the presence of the Prince, the highest placed member of this society whose disarming gestures of noblesse oblige only accentuate his social, superiority 'Please it your grace lead on?

It is a concern present in Leonato's enthusiasm for what he believes is a match of his daughter with the Prince; acknowledged in Beatrice's own refusal of Don Pedro's hand — 'No, my lord, unless I might have another for working days. Your grace is too costly to wear every day' 2. Don Pedro thus represents the apex of a social pyramid constructed out of relations of dependency and desire. This is in striking contrast to Bandello's version, where the analogous figure receives only passing mention. Some of these hierarchies are intellectual, but mostly they are matters of caste, so that the beautiful people can also lay claim to a beautiful language, and the less glamorous seek to better themselves through speaking elegantly.

Shakespeare populates Messina with persons of social prominence and those who attend upon them. Antonio defers to Leonato, Verges to Dogberry, children to parents, soldiers to their leaders, the Watch to the constable. The lines of power are subtle, sometimes suspended, but ultimately firm.

Ursula and Margaret, for instance, are 'gentlewomen', take part in the dance in 2. Some productions cast them as ladies-in-waiting; others, as ladies' maids. The nub of the play's brush with tragedy is located in these social dynamics. While the Watch promptly discover the truth about Hero's slander in advance of the wedding, 15 Introduction Dogberry's need first to impress upon Leonato his own importance, which he does by denigrating Verges, exhausts the harried Governor's short supply of patience and ultimately prevents the news from coming out in time to prevent suffering.

To say that Shakespeare gets all this from the fifth canto of Orlando Furioso is to over-privilege the latter and underestimate Shakespeare's accomplishment; what he does is to elaborate a suggestion of caste into an entire and nuanced social universe in which the distinctions between ranks are both insisted upon and overlooked the social differences of Ariosto's chivalric and royal universe are, in fact, clearer and thus less treacherous.

Hero, for instance, may not be Don Pedro's social equal but the fiction of his suit to Hero provokes no adverse comment and he proposes himself as a match for Beatrice. In fact, the chief difference of Much Ado from its sources lies in Shakespeare's alteration of a fact of social status. It is crucial to Shakespeare's version that Hero's suitor, unlike Sir Timbreo, is not greatly above Leonato in rank, and perhaps not at all in fortune, if Claudio's enquiry about Hero's inheritance is to be credited although such a question would have been routine and not necessarily over-mercenary.

Unlike Ariodante, he is not significantly below her either. Claudio is also explicitly young 'Lord Lack-beard' 5. Thus the explanation of the lover's snobbery which allows Messer Leonato de' Lionati to rebut Sir Timbreo's allegations with the confidence that he knows 'how [his daughter] hath been reared and what her habits are' is not available to Shakespeare's father character. The difference results in a different figure of a father as well as a lover, and opens up an entirely new dimension of psychological depth and loss for this father: Shakespeare's father character, in both the extremity 16 Introduction of his loss and the bravado of his recovery, is quite different from the confident and expedient Messer Lionato.

Shakespeare seems interested in authority figures generally, adding Antonio in addition to Dogberry, expanding the role of Don Pedro, and inventing the Friar, resourceful where Leonato is not. And if Shakespeare's alteration of Bandello's status relations between the lovers gives scope for parental pain, the chivalric posture, perhaps inspired by Ariosto, allows Leonato to recoup a kind of disinterested avuncular posture sorely lacking in him by the end of the church scene. Unlike the paternal blocking figure of comic convention, Leonato displays a great emotional range; measured by the extravagance and quantity of the poetry alone, he far more than Claudio might conceivably be seen as the protagonist of the play's semi-tragic plot.

Eighteenth-century pictorial representations of 4. The villain The subtle pressures of social hierarchy and rivalry also account for the unique nature of Shakespeare's villain. Don John is the bastard brother of Don Pedro. He is referred to as a prince, but he is perhaps not as much a prince as his brother, and when the play opens he has been recently vanquished in a fraternal battle. His illegitimacy is not made explicit in the play until 4.

However, Don John's melancholy and enviousness, perhaps betokened in the original productions by black costume, may have emblematized the circumstances of his birth for a Renaissance audience, and served implicitly to explain his disgruntlement so 1 Leonato speaks 24 per cent of the play's verse; Claudio, Like King Lear's Edmund, Don John's ethical nature seems predetermined by the political and economic circumstances of his birth.

That the villain of a play concerned with sexual fidelity is an actual bastard seemingly rationalizes its emphasis on the importance of social legitimacy by producing evidence of the unpleasant consequences of violating it. Cuckoldry leads to and stems from villainy, or so is the implicit moral of the anxiety. Shakespeare's wrong-side-ofthe-blanket villain is not exactly base-born, in the etymological sense of vilein, but he is a kind of walking impersonation of the way in which illegitimate sexual activity can produce social malcontents.

Whether or not Don John's illegitimacy is literally worn on his sleeve, his role in the story of slander is a unique one. In all previous versions of the story excepting Spenser's, the slander stems from a jealous rival for the heroine's hand. The Anatomy of Wit is another example, and many of the play's comments on female infidelity echo those of that text. Given the conventions within which Shakespeare is working, then, the villain of the play would ordinarily be Claudio's 'new sworn brother' Benedick 1. This theory is sometimes advanced by productions seeking to explain his actions by means of longing glances towards her.

Don John's malignity, however, is motiveless or at least mixed - he is jealous of Claudio's position with his brother, perhaps disgruntled about his subjugation in the recent war in which Claudio subdued him , or perhaps just a 'plain-dealing villain' 1.

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Yet Shakespeare softens his portrait of him as well as indicting him: The diffusion of criminal responsibility between the two perhaps serves to dilute the sense of villainy so that it does not overwhelm the capacity of comedy to contain or forestall it. Evil in this play is muted by having been built by committee, and is thus a mirror image of the clumsy but ultimately providential collaborations of Dogberry and his men.

The lover The place where Shakespeare most decisively departs from his predecessors is in the creation of his lover. Claudio is far more of a cad than his counterparts. Ariosto's Ariodante is positively saintly, defending his mistress against his brother's challenge despite thinking her guilty. Sir Timbreo, once 'his despite was now in great part cooled and reason began to open his eyes', begins to himself work out the possibility that he was mistaken Bullough, Unlike Sir Timbreo, who is close enough to the window to smell the alleged suitor, Claudio must form his judgement from 'afar off in the orchard', on a 'dark night' 3.

For Sir Timbreo the seduction scene alone is sufficient to convince, while for Claudio the 'oaths' of Don John and Borachio's further testimony are crucial. And whereas Sir Timbreo's rejection of Fenicia is carried out by messenger, after he witnesses the window scene, Claudio responds to the mere allegation of Hero's infidelity with a ready plan of public vengeance: But it is an unavoidable observation that Shakespeare deliberately provides us with a less than appealing suitor.

Shakespeare may draw his heroine's name from the story of two loyal lovers, but the suitor in question resembles 'Leander the good swimmer' 5. Claudio's shortcomings in the trust department are also in keeping with his earlier lack of confidence in the loyalty of friends, when he suspects that Don Pedro has appropriated Hero for himself.

His behaviour after the report of Hero's death is no less disappointing the Friar's plan for instituting remorse seems not to have fully succeeded , which is consistent with the realism of this rendition. Shakespeare goes out of his way to give us a suitor who is morally faint of heart and faith, at a disadvantage in the lists of love and friendship. This has rendered Claudio vulnerable to critical scorn, as 'a miserable specimen' Ridley, , or 'the least amiable lover in Shakespeare' Harbage, ; another commentator claims that love never did have 'interest in his liver': What Claudio is really interested in is a good and suitable marriage' Prouty, 42, Defences of his behaviour, on the other hand, cite the conventional nature of his love: Mulryne grants him a quasi-tragic status: He is easy prey for Don John precisely because of a deeply ingrained mistrust of his own feelings; he cannot exclude the possibility of his being quite wrong about his most intimate beliefs' Mulryne, Other commentators point out that while the grounds of such a match may not be romantically thrilling, they are unobjectionable by the terms of the day.

At the same 20 Introduction time, as Sheldon Zitner aptly observes, 'the ensuing marriage of Claudio and Hero is not quite as everyone would like it. Nor can we condescend to Elizabethan audiences by assuming it was wholly as they liked it' Oxf1,1. Benedick and Beatrice's courtship surely criticizes the younger pair's, and vice versa much as in The Taming of the Shrew, where Shakespeare sketches a similar contrast between Petruchio and Kate and Lucio and Bianca.

These defences remind us, however, that while it would be inaccurate to interpret Claudio as contemptible, he is nevertheless somewhat of a disappointment. He is, above all, young: The unpromising nature of Claudio as a hero deserving of comic happiness, as well as the enigma of his final union to a veiled woman, have suggested to Jonathan Bate another analogue for Shakespeare's play which might help to condition his status as a lover.

This is Euripides' Alcestis, named after its heroine. She volunteers to die in place of her husband Admetus, whose hospitality to the gods has earned him in the event of his death the reprieve of a substitute Alcestis is the only family member who volunteers for the mission. Hercules discovers her sacrifice, fetches her from the underworld and returns her to her husband in the veiled guise of a new wife.

Admetus, however, has pledged not to remarry, and he protests at the gift. The occasion gives Admetus an opportunity to voice his own guilt at allowing his wife to die on his behalf: Unlike Sir Timbreo, but like Admetus, Claudio must accept his second bride without seeing her face, a stipulation that reverses the terms of his initial error in which he identified a woman by outward signs rather than inner conviction , and forces him to have faith where once 21 Introduction he lacked it.

Hero's mock funeral, in turn, recalls and prefigures other of Shakespeare's mock deaths, such as Juliet's or Helena's or Hermione's, in which heroines undergo a trial passage to the underworld. Euripides' Alcestis is also structurally similar to Much Ado in its use of comic scenes those of Hercules' drunken festivities during the heroine's funeral to counterpoint the apparent tragedy and hint at the comic ending to come. The type of the less than ideal protagonist who is nonetheless included in the redemptions of comedy may have been relatively unobjectionable to a Reformation audience not only familiar with the convention of the arranged marriage but unsurprised by the unregenerate quality of mankind in general.

Beyond the plot The changes so far detailed concern for the most part matters of character, of Shakespeare's expansion of the psychological scope of his source materials chiefly by means of the manipulation of details of status.



Don Pedro, for example, is transformed from a mere mention in Bandello to a type of deus ex machina, one of the 'only love-gods' 2. He is in the party, but not of it, participating in disguise as a suitor, but not ultimately one of the final festive company: We still however are working within an understanding of source as referring to the origins of plot, and thus have yet to address the existence of Benedick, Beatrice or the Watch. If we are to account for these other elements, we need to move to a broader understanding of the cultural resources and generic exigencies that go into shaping an author's decisions.

The intention is not to discount Shakespeare's 22 Introduction originality, but better to illuminate the nature of his invention by comparison with shared cultural and dramatic assumptions that serve as foils to his own compositional choices. Denouement Certainly the presence of the Watch can be in part attributed to the representational requirements of drama. Unlike a novella or a poem, a play unless it is The Winter's Tale usually cannot wait a year or even Bandello's week for the remorse of the villain to effect a denouement.

In Shakespeare, indeed, it is not clear whether the villain does repent - although Borachio is contrite, Don John flees, and Claudio's own acknowledgement of culpability is potentially graceless and unlikely to provoke much in the way of reparation without further prompting. Furthermore, this play's peculiar emotional tenor, of a comedy whose rewards are hard won, depends upon the pleasurable frustrations of a villainy only slowly apprehended. Hence the utility of the Watch as the agent of revelation: The inept quality of the police force in Much Ado may indeed owe more to the realities of Elizabethan policing than to any other source.

For instance, the contradictions, and difficulties, of ordinary citizens policing their betters in a hierarchical society - 'If you meet the prince in the night you may stay him. Dekker scorns the indolence and inefficacy of urban watches, easily smelled out by their excessive onion-eating 'to 23 Introduction 1 An early modem watchman, with his bill and lantern, from Thomas Dekker's Gull's Hornbook keep them in sleeping' and their preferential treatment of the gentry 'the watch will wink at you, only for the love they bear to arms and knighthood', Dogberry's crew shares these assumptions about their responsibilities: The impulse to let a sleeping watch lie may in fact have been a strategic choice of a society with no standing army or police force, and suspicious, as one historian puts it, of 'the over-efficiency of even good enforcement systems' Spinrad, Kemp was notorious for the athleticism of his jig, and jigs often followed the ending of a play.

Rossiter comments, 'As a real official Dogberry would be a terror. Conceited ignorance and vast self-importance in local government officers is - and was, in the time of Elizabeth - as good a joke in fiction as a very bad joke in fact' Rossiter, In addition, the improvisational and extemporal abilities of the actor Will Kemp, who may have originally played Dogberry if we take the Quarto speech prefixes as evidence , may have suggested to Shakespeare a role that would accommodate and even satirize the desire to upstage his fellows.

Dogberry's own desire for the spotlight he is both eager and outraged to be 'writ down an ass', 4. Dialogue and debate forms Another obvious requirement of drama is the need to transmit information through dialogue; hence the need for the play's many pairs: Since information often unfolds through a process of debate, these pairs are often composed of foils: The use of such foils is arguably a device of any drama, indebted to the drama's roots in the scholastic convention of in utramque partem debate, in which contenders voiced opposing sides of an argument in order to demonstrate their rhetorical prowess Altman.

The prevalence of the dialogue convention in Renaissance prose fiction and rhetorical manuals - Castiglione's Cortegiano, Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione , Lyly's Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England - bespeaks its availability for dramatic representation. Yet Much Ado, with its emphasis on wit, is particularly devoted to rhetorical contest, and these texts are especially pertinent.

Many of Benedick's comments on the fair sex derive from Lyly, and Castiglione offers a model of intellectual contest and compatibility between the sexes, especially in his portrait of the exchanges between Lord Gaspare Pallavicino and Lady Emilia, the one a professed misogynist and the other a defender of her sex Scott, Much Ado's stylistic register, from repartee to courtly exchange, is also indebted to debate forms. From Lyly's text comes the coinage for the very style in which the men of 26 Introduction Much Ado often converse, 'euphuism' being the form of verbal exchange which consists in complicated syntactic parallelisms, chiasmus or inversions, and balanced structures, and above all in a competitive turning and returning of one's own terms and those of others see 'Style', pp.

However, euphuism is not a merely stylistic feature of this play, for its forms provide the currency by which the men create community.

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Male banter is a kind of verbal version of the secret handshake, cementing bonds and denoting hierarchy in much the same manner as the exchange of women. One of the reasons Beatrice is perceived to be 'an excellent wife for Benedick' 2. Euphuism is thus not just a source of the play's prose patterns but a medium of its gender roles, and dialogue is not merely a formal necessity of drama but a marker of social identity. The existence of dialogue manuals itself bespeaks a market of people who want to learn to exchange witticisms Dogberry no doubt owns one, or would if he could read, whereas Beatrice is offended at the notion that her wit derives from a jest-book.

In Shakespeare's use of dialogue structures and styles we can see another instance of his use of forms in order to create a social world. Sexual slander requires a universe of rank and rivalry shaped by alliances between men, themselves shaped, among other ways, by the traffic both in words and in women so that the semantic looseness emphasized by verbal badinage contributes to the imputed looseness of women. Thus in investigating Shakespeare's construction of gender identity we find other materials that might be considered as contributing to the intellectual conditions of possibility of this play.

These materials include not only the formal patterns of dialogue and debate conventions, but contexts such as conduct books, theological and medical discourses, and the popular humour of cuckold jokes. As Linda Woodbridge has demonstrated, the debate on the question of woman's worth dates from the time of medieval universities, and received new momentum with the arrival of print culture: In woman's favour were cited models of chastity, thrift and heroism; against her lay charges of sexual promiscuity, and weakness of reason and body among other faults.

Authors weighed in on both sides of the question in order to demonstrate their rhetorical gifts, sometimes in different publications and sometimes in the very same work e. Pyrrye, The Praise and Dispraise of Women Benedick's own sudden reversal from a man who swears 'till [love] have made an oyster of me he shall never make me such a fool' 2. The scholastic range of Benedick's reference also perhaps reflects his hailing from Padua, 'nursery of arts' TS 1.

As this edition's commentary documents, several of Benedick's tirades against women e. An excellent, pleasant, and philosophical controversy between the two Tassi where the Tasso brothers took up different sides of the question: Demosthenes, writing vnto the Tyrant Corynthus his friend, who had requested him to set downe his censure, what qualities one should seeke to finde in a woman that he ment to marry withal, returned him this answere: First, shee must be rich, that thou maist have wherewithall to live in shewe and carrie a port: Shakespeare's account differs, of course, in the deft stylistic drollery with which it is presented: Benedick begins his meditation by disavowing love 'love.

He seemingly concludes his description with another protestation of disdain - 'till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace' - but then starts up again, as if he cannot resist 1 Tasso, sig. The fruit on his shoulder is the quince, symbol of fertility. From Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia the speculation. Shakespeare thus broaches the stereotype of the misogynist, but he animates it in the personality of one who seems to protest too much, a character who seems to need the convention as a defence against his own impulse to the contrary.

In describing a woman who is fair, wise, rich, virtuous, mild, noble and of good discourse, Benedick contemplates a kind of Renaissance fantasy girl, one who is all things to one man. She is not one who appears very often in the more practical-minded literatures of the day devoted to the process of mate selection see pp.

Even Benedick himself acknowledges the unlikelihood of 30 Introduction Vh Amris. Much Ado's many references to the emasculated Hercules recall this iconography. More common was the notation of the failure to fulfil the ideal, and man's subservience to female domination brought on by the marriage yoke see Figs 3 and 4.

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A chief obstacle to masculine happiness in marriage was a wife's failure to submit herself to being yoked, either verbally or sexually or both. Most of the Renaissance writings against women share the assumption about the link between verbal dexterity and sexual licence, and thus emphasize the threat of female loquaciousness to the security of patrilineal identity: An ideal Renaissance woman was one seen but not heard, one who, in every sense, doesn't give anything away.

We can sense in such statements the tenacity of medieval Christianity's idea of women as the heirs of Eve, that disobedient and fleshly creature who is punished for her disobedience with the arduous task of painfully peopling the world 'sure, my lord, my mother cried', 2. While the play ultimately repudiates many of these notions of female identity - Benedick readily decides to love his intellectual and verbal equal — they do inform both its jokes about the male distrust of women and the psychological grounds of the slander plot.

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Indeed, while Benedick has no share in the slander of Hero, he is the voice of the play's most misogynist commentary: The idea of woman as subordinate to man was a stereotype with biological as well as theological and political dimensions: When Beatrice tells Benedick that 1 One anatomical theory of the period held that the ovaries and the uterus were an inverted penis and testicles that had not been conceived at a temperature high enough to expel them, right side out, of the foetus.

See Thomas Lacqueur, Making Sex: Disdain Beatrice, for her part, recalls in her alleged shrewishness the bane of much misogynistic writing, although the extent to which she fulfils descriptions of her as a 'harpy' 2. But this emphasis on Shakespeare's invocations of the Renaissance conventions of male suspicion of women should not obscure the fact that Much Ado portrays the resistance to marriage as characteristic of women as well as men.

The characters of both Beatrice and Benedick draw on the convention of the 'disdainer of love' who comes to recant and even regret his or her former protestations of disinclination. Claudio swears off love at least twice. Spenser's The Faerie Queene includes both male and female versions: Like Arthur, she is eventually humbled, though her comeuppance is significantly more abrading,1 as she is brought before Cupid's court and sentenced to save as many loves as she had once scorned twenty-two ; her jailers on the journey are the tyrannous Disdain and the scourging Scorn, a pair which Hero describes as also riding 'sparkling' in the eyes of Beatrice 3.

Beatrice is also stung in the masque scene by the allegation that she is 'disdainful' 'Well, this was Signor Benedick that said so', 2. The 'scorner of love' who finds him or herself forced to recant was a familiar literary figure; the most prominent instance prior to Shakespeare lies in the first book of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, where Troilus is punished as a heretic to love by falling for Criseyde. Shakespeare's heroines almost to a woman display the ability to cast a cold eye upon the male of the species before themselves putting on the destined livery.

Castiglione provides another precedent of disdain or at least disinclination being transformed by common opinion to the contrary: Modifications of type These kinds of indebtedness demonstrate not just how Beatrice and Benedick derive from Renaissance assumptions about gender identity, but how the play also challenges these assumptions. However much they may invoke such discourses, Benedick and 1 Castiglione, The Courtier, The passage goes on to remark on the force of communal report: Benedick's reversal is as delightful as it is predictable, and Beatrice's bark lacks the bite of a more confirmed shrew such as Katerina.

The charges of her shrewishness levied by her uncle and Antonio never really stick - as Leonato knows, 'There's little of the melancholy element in her' 2. Benedick's own allegations about her speech have more to do with the enviable speed and agility of her tongue rather than its mere logorrhoea. Bested as he often is by her wit, he is not a dispassionate judge. As in the case of Benedick's acerbic bachelorhood, Beatrice's shrewishness is hardly a confirmed state, but rather a type which Shakespeare suggests only to bounce off, or back away from, in another demonstration of the play's concern with the frequent distance between who people imagine themselves to be and who they actually are.

The sense throughout is that these two are using the conventions as a form of disguise or protective camouflage, or as a defence against the greater conventionality of being lovelorn; depending on the production, they throw them off either willingly or reluctantly, but throw them off they do. Even if for yet another convention: Benedick, for instance, goes from being the most articulate source of the play's misogyny to a chivalric defender of woman's honour - a conversion from one norm of male behaviour to another.

And Beatrice prompts this reversal by an acknowledgement of her own irretrievably female identity: I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving', 4. Overall these gender stereotypes come across as rather archly staged roles; we can sense Shakespeare's nod to the conventional postures, but also his mockery of them. Despite the occasional dissenting voice one nineteenthcentury critic held her to be 'an odious woman' Campbell, xlvi , she is generally the most beloved of Shakespearean heroines, for her very vitality, generosity of spirit and wit, and the graceful but firm insistence with which she claims intellectual equality with men.

Benedick's own characterizations of her as a 'harpy', 'infernal Ate' or 'my Lady Tongue' - all terms for a shrew - are comical in part because they are so far from the mark, as well as so obviously the slurs of one who has been bested by a woman who 'speaks poniards' 2. Her playful resistance to the thought of subjugation in marriage - 'Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? The homicidal ferocity of her devotion to her cousin — 'Kill Claudio' 4.

Talk with a man out at a window! For all her intellectual pride, she is the first to admit that vanity is worth nothing when it is the cause of social divisiveness: Her wit works to produce pleasure and joy, with nothing truly grudging about it. What is perhaps most surprising about Beatrice's relation to convention is that her flirtation with verbal prowess never seems to compromise her sexual reputation; it rather only argues for her intellectual parity with Benedick.

This is significantly unlike the assumptions of much Renaissance misogynistic writing, where the link between verbal and sexual freedom is repeatedly underscored. In fact, her speech is not characterized by excess or amplification - that would be Benedick - so much as by the darting, spare quip. The point is explicitly made perhaps in order to reassure? Other characters in the play do imagine Beatrice in racy situations 'A maid and stuffed!

When the men gull Benedick, they relate a racy joke about Beatrice writing in her nightgown, herself horrified at having found 'Benedick' and 'Beatrice' 'between the sheet' 2. The sheets here are paper, but the joke lies in the pun informed by the connection of women, words and sex that propels so much of the conventional writings against women. Further corroboration of Beatrice's unladylike affection for words comes in the play's closing revelation that she, like Benedick, has been writing sonnets, and in her quip in the first scene that if Benedick were in her books - i.

Yet despite these assumed links between loose words and loose women, so prevalent in the culture at large, the fact remains that the eloquent Beatrice's virtue is never in doubt. There is some acknowledgement in Lyly that women should be well spoken when occasion requires it, and heroines who are both articulate and nonetheless virtuous are common in Shakespeare. Thus when 37 Introduction her uncle says that Beatrice apprehends 'passing shrewdly' in her estimate of marriage, we should hear it in the sense of perceptive, or sharp, rather than cross or lewd - as she replies, 'I have a good eye, uncle; I can see a church by daylight' 2.

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To see clearly is an important and rare feature in this play, and it is 'my Lady Tongue' 2. In a plot whose stumbling block is the fear of cuckoldry, it is the quiet ones, like Hero, that you have to watch out for. Of particular interest is a class of writings concerned with the organization and regulation of the early modern family see L.

These 'conduct books' share many of the assumptions of the debate literature when it comes to the disputed nature of womankind, but unlike that tradition, do so without irony, in deadly earnest, and not primarily in the service of rhetorical performance.

The conduct-book tradition derived from the impetus of Protestant reformers eager to define marriage as an institution crucial to spiritual well-being and hence necessary for priests ; it was a genre also helped along by the increasing sense of the family as an economic unit, and the importance of a proper wife to its prosperity. Thus marriage in such texts begins to be defined not merely as a way to avoid the damnation attendant upon unregulated lust, or as a means of peopling the world, but as a source of companionship both intellectual and spiritual. Briefs for this new kind of marriage were written by and for men, but they introduced a woman different from her medieval sisters.

Eve 1 Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew is another superficially demure but troublesome figure though more intentionally so than Hero. Citations of the Galatians verse 'there is neither lew nor Grecian: Bullinger is careful to stipulate that if woman was to be set alongside man, 'yet was she not made of the head' sig. A4V ; other writers pointed out that if a rib was not exactly dirt, it did derive from the flesh, and hence was in need of male control.

St Paul underscored this hierarchy: Spousal companionship in this culture is officially thus perhaps less a marriage of true minds than a re absorption of female into male. But we can also see that Shakespeare's offering of a Benedick and Beatrice-type intellectual pairing 'if they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad', 2. However, Beatrice is an uncommon figure, 'odd and from all fashions' 3. It is the dilemma of Hero as a victim of slander and impersonation that these texts illuminate most clearly.

The centrality of companionship to marriage meant that the process of choosing a suitable wife - one meant to help you get ahead as well as into heaven - began to loom large in the male imagination. Women were by both nature and culture inscrutable, and hence a whole industry of what we would call self-help books, or, less kindly, consumer guides, began to appear. Texts with titles such as How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad , A Discourse 39 Introduction of Marriage and Wiving , or A Looking Glass for Married Folks reminded prospective early modern bridegrooms how important the choice of a spouse was to one's domestic peace, prosperity and spiritual salvation - as well as how difficult it was.

The very existence of such guides suggests, however, that the ideal is easier described than found; their recommendations for proceeding suggest that the reason for the difficulty lies not only in the scarcity of good women but also in the limitations of the technologies available to discover them.

How could a woman's nature and character be known? These guides are thus semiotic in nature, designed to enable the prospective suitor to discover a virtuous spouse by interpreting the marks of her speech, appearance and reputation. Yet the difficulty of finding a good woman lay not only in the ways in which bad women might impersonate the good; one author warned that 'thys undertaking is a matter of some difficulty, for good wiues are many times so like vnto bad that they are hardly discerned betwixt' Niccholes, sig.

More troubling still was that even though a bridegroom needed to look for signs of virtue, the very existence of legible signs ironically rendered a woman suspect. For a good woman was by definition inconspicuous, but hence at times potentially inscrutable. For example, the standard advice in such manuals was to observe signs of behaviour, such as 'a sober and mild aspect, courteous behaviour, decent carriage, of a fixed eye, constant look, and unaffected gate, the contrary being oftentimes signs of ill portent and consequence' Niccholes, sig.

Redheads were to be avoided, as well as women who were either too beautiful 'many times both to herself and to them that beholde her beautie is a prouocation to much euiP or too far above one in social station liable to upset the gender hierarchy R. But 1 Heywood, Man; Niccholes; Snawsel.

A frequent dilemma is that a good woman can be known by her speech, but a truly good woman will be silent. Similarly, while 'the lookes' are an index of 'godliness in the face', the truly godly face will be veiled, 'to shewe how a modeste countenance and womanly shamefastnesse doe command a chaste wife; it is observed, that the word Nuptiae, doth declare the manner of her marriage. For it importeth a couering, because Virgins which should be married, when they come to their husbands for modestie and shamefastness did couer their faces' R. So, " 0 prequel " sorts by 0 under the label "prequel.

Series was designed to cover groups of books generally understood as such see Wikipedia: Like many concepts in the book world, "series" is a somewhat fluid and contested notion. A good rule of thumb is that series have a conventional name and are intentional creations , on the part of the author or publisher. For now, avoid forcing the issue with mere "lists" of works possessing an arbitrary shared characteristic, such as relating to a particular place.

Avoid series that cross authors, unless the authors were or became aware of the series identification eg. Also avoid publisher series, unless the publisher has a true monopoly over the "works" in question. So, the Dummies guides are a series of works. But the Loeb Classical Library is a series of editions, not of works. Home Groups Talk Zeitgeist. The 12 Days of LT scavenger hunt is going on. Can you solve the clues?

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