Hero. And here's another,
Writ in my cousin's hand, stol'n from her pocket, Containing her affection unto Benedick.
Benedick. A miracle! Here's our own hands against our hearts. Come, I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity.
Beatrice. I would not deny you; but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.
Benedick.deg Peace! I will stop your mouth. [Kisses her.]
Don Pedro. How dost thou, Benedick, the married man?
Benedick. I'll tell thee what, Prince: a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humor. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No. If a man will be beaten with brains, 'a shall wear nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion. For thy part, Claudio, I did think to have beaten thee; but in that thou art like to be my kinsman, live unbruised, and love my cousin.
Claudio. I had well hoped thou wouldst have denied Beatrice, that I might have cudgeled thee out of thy single life, to make thee a double-dealer,deg which out of question thou wilt be if my cousin do not look exceeding narrowly to thee.
Benedick. Come, come, we are friends. Let's have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives' heels.
87 halting limping
97 Benedick (both Quarto and Folio assign this line to Leonato ; possibly the original reading is correct, and Lconato forces Benedick to kiss Beatrice)
114 double-dealer ( 1 ) married man (2) unfaithful husband
Leonato. We'll have dancing afterward.
Benedick. First, of my word; therefore play, music. Prince, thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife! There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.deg
Enter Messenger.
Messenger. My lord, your brother John is ta'en in flight,
And brought with armed men back to Messina.
Benedick. Think not on him till tomorrow. I'll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers! Dance. [Exeunt.]
FINIS.
123-24 with horn (final reference to the horns of a cuckold)
Textual Note
The present text of Much Ado About Nothing is based upon the Quarto edition of the play, published in 1600. The Folio text of 1623 is a slightly edited version of this Quarto.
The first stage direction in the Quarto (repeated in the Folio) includes what is sometimes called a phantom character, a character who never speaks and who is never addressed. After "Leonato Governor of Messina" the stage direction adds "Innogen his wife" (see page lxxiii). Presumably Shakespeare thought he would create this character, but then found, as he wrote the scene, that he had no need for her. In all probability we have evidence here that the printer's copy was Shakespeare's manuscript, rather than a theatrical promptbook. Other bits of evidence tend to confirm this view that we are close to the author's table. In 1.2, Antonio is designated "Old" in the Quarto, meaning old man. In 2.1, Antonio's speeches are assigned to "Brother." In 4.2, "Kemp" and "Cowley," the actors intended for the roles, are assigned the speeches for Dogberry and Verges. At the beginning of 5.3, a stage direction calls for "three or four with tapers."
The present edition regularizes all speech prefixes. All act and scene divisions are bracketed, since (like indications of locale) these are not in the Quarto. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, and obvious typographical errors have been corrected. The positions of a few stage directions have been slightly altered; necessary directions that are not given in the Quarto are added in brackets. Other substantial departures from the Quarto are listed below, the adopted reading first, in italics, and then the Quarto's reading in roman type. If the adopted reading comes from the Folio, the fact is indicated by [F] following it.
1.1. s.d. [Q has "Innogen his wife," i.e., Leonato's wife, before "Hero"; she does not appear in the play] 1Don Pedro Don Peter 9-10 Don Pedro Don Peter 195 Enter Don Pedro Enter don Pedro, Iohn the bastard
2.1. s.d. Hero his wife, Hero niece neece, and a kinsman 84 s.d. Don John or dumb Iohn 208 s.d. [Q adds "Iohn and Borachio, and Conrade"]
2.3.138 us of [F] of vs
3.2.52 Don Pedro [F] Bene
4.2 s.d. [Q places "Borachio" immediately after "Constables"]
5.3.1 dumb [F] dead 22 Claudio Lo[rd]
5.4.54 Antonio Leo 97 Benedick Leon
A Note on the Sources of Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing combines two plots, the Hero Claudio tragicomic one and the Beatrice-Benedick comic one. Shakespeare himself seems to have hit on the idea of joining the two, though if he knew of an earlier work in which they had already been combined, he surely would not have scrupled to follow suit.
The gist of the Hero-Claudio plot--a girl is said to be false and her finance is so deceived that he denounces her, though later they are reconciled--is ancient. It is also the basis of a series of stories popular in the sixteenth century. It can scarcely be doubted that Shakespeare knew it in the versions of Ariosto (Orlando Furioso was translated by Sir John Harington and plundered by Edmund Spenser) and Bandello (the Novelle were translated into French by Belle-forest). Quite possibly Shakespeare was acquainted with a number of other versions. Shakespeare's own addition of Dogberry and Verges, for which at best he had only bare hints, gives this Hero-Claudio plot most of its vitality.
The comic intrigue of Beatrice and Benedick is scarcely a plot, and it would be foolish to attempt to isolate a source for it. Sixteenth-century literature offers numerous ladies and gentlemen who wittily scorn each other. In the English drama before Shakespeare, John Lyly had made something of a specialty of such combats. There are, moreover, nondramatic works (Lyly is again reluctant) that may also have given Shakespeare hints. Possibly a paragraph in Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (translated by Sir Thomas Hoby) sparked his imagination: I have also seen a most fervent love spring in the heart of a woman toward one that seemed at first not to bear him the least affection in the world, only for that they heard say that the opinion of many was that they loved together.
It should be remembered, too, that Beatrice and Benedick are not Shakespeare's first witty, bickering lovers. In Love's Labor's Lost, Biron ("not a word with him but a jest") and Rosaline ("A wightly wanton") anticipate Beatrice and Benedick.
Passages from several books that probably influenced Much Ado are given in the second volume of Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, but when one has read Much Ado each source seems like Charles Lamb's poor relation: "the most irrelevant thing in nature--a piece of impertinent correspondency."
Commentaries
CHARLES GILDON
The Argument of Much Ado About Nothing
The scene lies at Messina in Sicily and in and near the house of Leonato. Don Pedro of Aragon with his favorite Claudio, and Benedick a gay young cavalier of Padua, and Don John the bastard brother of Don Pedro, come to Leonato's, the Governor of Messina. Claudio is in love with Hero, Leonato's daughter, whom Don Pedro obtains for him, and while they wait the wedding day, they consult how to make Benedick and Beatrice, the niece of Leonato, in love with each other, both being gay and easy and averse to love and like great talkers, railing always at each other. However, by letting them overhear their discourse they persuade them that they are in love with each other. In the meantime Don John, the very soul of envy and mischief, contrives how to break the match betwixt Claudio and Hero, and to this purpose, by his engines, Conrade and Borachio, they make Claudio and the Prince believe that Hero is a wanton and put a plausible cheat on them to confirm the suspicion by having Borachio talk to Hero's maid, Margaret, at the chamber window at midnight, as if she were Hero. Convinced by this fallacy, Claudio and Don Pedro disgrace her in the church where he went to marry her, rejecting her, and accusing
her of wantonness with another. Hero swoons away, and the priest interposing and, joining in the attestation she makes of her virtue, she is privately conveyed away and reported dead. The rogue Borachio being taken by the watch, as he was telling the adventure to his comrade, discovers the villainy and clears Hero; but Don John is fled. Her innocence being known, her father is satisfied with Claudio, that he hang verses on her tomb that night and marry a niece of his the next morning without seeing her face, which he agrees to and performs, and then it is discovered that it is Hero whom he married and so the play ends with an account of Don John's being taken.
From The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 1710.
This fable is as full of absurdities as the writing is full of beauties: the first I leave to the reader to find out by the rules I have laid down; the second I shall endeavor to show and point out some few of the many that are contained in the play. Shakespear indeed had the misfortune which other of our poets have since had of laying his scene in a warm climate where the manners of the people are very different from ours, and yet he has made them talk and act generally like men of a colder country; Marriage a la Mode has the same fault.
This play we must call a comedy, though some of the incidents and discourses too are more in a tragic strain; and that of the accusation of Hero is too shocking for either tragedy or comedy; nor could it have come off in nature, if we regard the country, without the death of more than Hero. The imposition on the Prince and Claudio seems very lame, and Claudio's conduct to the woman he loved highly contrary to the very nature of love, to expose her in so barbarous a manner and with so little concern and struggle, and on such weak grounds without a farther examination into the matter, yet the passions this produces in the old father make a wonderful amends for the fault. Besides which there is such a pleasing variety of characters in the play, and those perfectly maintained, as well as distinguished, that you lose the absurdities of the conduct in the excellence of the manners, sentiments, diction, and topics. Benedick and Beatrice are two sprightly, witty, talkative characters, and, though of the same nature, yet perfectly distinguished, and you have no need to read the names to know who speaks. As they differ from each other, though so near akin, so do they from that of Lucio in Measure for Measure, who is likewise a very talkative person; but there is a gross abusiveness, calumny, lying, and lewdness in Lucio, which Benedick is free from. One is a rake's mirth and tattle; the other that of a gentleman and a man of spirit and wit.
The stratagem of the Prince on Benedick and Beatrice is managed with that nicety and address that we are very well pleased with the success and think it very reasonable and just.
The character of Don John the Bastard is admirably distinguished, his manners are well marked, and everywhere convenient or agreeable. Being a sour, melancholy, saturnine, envious, selfish, malicious temper--manners necessary to produce these villainous events they did--these were productive of the catastrophe, for he was not a person brought in to fill up the number only, because without him the fable could not have gone on.
To quote all the comic excellencies of this play would be to transcribe three parts of it. For all that passes betwixt Benedick and Beatrice is admirable. His discourse against love and marriage in the later end of the second act is very pleasant and witty, and that which Beatrice says of wooing, wedding, and repenting. And the aversion that the poet gives Benedick and Beatrice for each other in their discourse heightens the jest of making them in love with one another. Nay, the variety and natural distinction of the vulgar humors of this play are remarkable.
The scenes of this play are something obscure, for you can scarce tell where the place is in the two first acts, though the scenes in them seem pretty entire and unbroken. But those are things we ought not to look much for in Shakespear. But whilst he is out in the dramatic imitation of the fable, he always draws men and women so perfectly that when we read, we can scarce persuade ourselves but that the discourse is real and no fiction.
LEWIS CARROLL
A Letter to Ellen Terry
Now I'm going to put before you a "Hero-ic" puzzle of mine, but please remember I do not ask for your solution of it, as you will persist in believing, if I ask your help in a Shakespeare difficulty, that I am only jesting! However, if you won't attack it yourself, perhaps you would ask Mr. Irving someday how he explains it?
My difficulty is this: Why in the world did not Hero (or at any rate Beatrice on her behalf) prove an "alibi" in answer to the charge? It seems certain that she did not sleep in her room that night; for how could Margaret venture to open the window and talk from it, with her mistress asleep in the room? It would be sure to wake her. Besides Borachio says, after promising that Margaret shall speak with him out of Hero's chamber window, "I will so fashion the matter that Hero shall be absent." (How he could possibly manage any such thing is another difficulty, but I pass over that.) Well then, granting that Hero slept in some other room that night, why didn't she say so? When Claudio asks her: "What man was he talked with you yesternight out at your window betwixt twelve and one?" why doesn't she reply: "I talked with no man at that hour, my lord. Nor was I in my chamber yesternight, but in another, far from it, remote." And this she could, of course, prove by the evidence of the house-maids, who must have known that she had occupied another room that night.
But even if Hero might be supposed to be so distracted as not to remember where she had slept the night before, or even whether she had slept anywhere, surely Beatrice has her wits about her! And when an arrangement was made, by which she was to lose, for one night, her twelve-months' bedfellow, is it conceivable that she didn't know where Hero passed the night? Why didn't she reply: But good my lord sweet Hero slept not there:
She had another chamber for the nonce.
'Twas sure some counterfeit that did present
Her person at the window, aped her voice,
Her mien, her manners, and hath thus deceived
My good Lord Pedro and this company?
From The Story of My Life by Ellen Terry. 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson and Company, n.d.).
With all these excellent materials for proving an "alibi" it is incomprehensible that no one should think of it. If only there had been a barrister present, to cross-examine Beatrice!
"Now, ma'am, attend to me, please, and speak up so that the jury can hear you. Where did you sleep last night? Where did Hero sleep? Will you swear that she slept in her own room? Will you swear that you do not know where she slept?" I feel inclined to quote old Mr. Weller and to say to Beatrice at the end of the play (only I'm afraid it isn't etiquette to speak across the footlights):
"Oh, Samivel, Samivel, vy vornt there a halibi?"
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Shakespear's Merry Gentlemen
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. St. James's Theatre, 16 February 1898. [26 February 1898]
Much Ado is perhaps the most dangerous actor-manager trap in the whole Shakespearean repertory. It is not a safe play like The Merchant of Venice or As You Like It, nor a serious play like Hamlet. Its success depends on the way it is handled in performance; and that, again, depends on the actor-manager being enough of a critic to discriminate ruthlessly between the pretension of the author and his achievement.
The main pretension in Much Ado is that Benedick and Beatrice are exquisitely witty and amusing persons. They are, of course, nothing of the sort. Benedick's pleasantries might pass at a singsong in a public-house parlor; but a gentleman rash enough to venture on them in even the very mildest PS52-a-year suburban imitation of polite society today would assuredly never be invited again. From his first joke,"Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?" to his last, "There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn," he is not a wit, but a blackguard. He is not Shakespear's only failure in that genre. It took the Bard a long time to grow out of the provincial conceit that made him so fond of exhibiting his accomplishments as a master of gallant badinage. The very thought of Biron, Mercutio, Gratiano, and Benedick must,
I hope, have covered him with shame in his later years. Even Hamlet's airy compliments to Ophelia before the court would make a cabman blush. But at least Shakespear did not value himself on Hamlet's indecent jests as he evidently did on those of the four merry gentlemen of the earlier plays. When he at last got conviction of sin, and saw this sort of levity in its proper light, he made masterly amends by presenting the blackguard as a blackguard in the person of Lucio in Measure for Measure. Lucio, as a character study, is worth forty Benedicks and Birons. His obscenity is not only inoffensive, but irresistibly entertaining, because it is drawn with perfect skill, offered at its true value, and given its proper interest, without any complicity of the author in its lewdness. Lucio is much more of a gentleman than Benedick, because he keeps his coarse sallies for coarse people. Meeting one woman, he says humbly, "Gentle and fair: your brother kindly greets you. Not to be weary with you, he's in prison." Meeting another, he hails her sparkingly with "How now? which of your hips has the more profound sciatica?" The woman is a lay sister, the other a prostitute. Benedick or Mercutio would have cracked their low jokes on the lay sister, and been held up as gentlemen of rare wit and excellent discourse for it. Whenever they approach a woman or an old man, you shiver with apprehension as to what brutality they will come out with.
From Our Theatres in the Nineties by George Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1932). Reprinted by permission of the Public Trustee and the Society of Authors.
Precisely the same thing, in the tenderer degree of her sex, is true of Beatrice. In her character of professed wit she has only one subject, and that is the subject which a really witty woman never jests about, because it is too serious a matter to a woman to be made light of without indelicacy. Beatrice jests about it for the sake of the indelicacy. There is only one thing worse than the Elizabethan "merry gentleman," and that is the Elizabethan "merry lady."