William Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor.
William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing.
Shakespeare’s only English comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor is also the purest of his comedies—the merriest, the most thoroughly funny of them, a bedroom farce in which almost no one gets into a bedroom. Set in continental Europe, Much Ado About Nothing threatens to veer into tragedy at any moment.
At Windsor, the English knight, Sir John Falstaff, scion of erstwhile warrior-aristocrats, has turned not merely to commerce but to the lowest commerce, the kind that has no respect for property upon which commerce depends, trafficking in swindles, more generally to speculating on what is not legitimately his own, with his schemes of adultery. He illustrates the self-contradiction of the commercial spirit, which, taken in its purest form, undermines itself.The only other ‘sir’ in the play is another figure of fun, a Welsh parson, in a regime where foreigners are funny. In commercial England, the most serious characters are bourgeois gentlemen and gentlewomen—the former a bit too serious, the latter witty but never dangerous avengers.
Not so on the continent. There, peaceful commerce has yet to replace war. There, the aristocrats are lords and ladies, rulers of states. They make war as well as love, alliances as well as money. Foreigners could be marriageable friends or deadly enemies. Much Ado About Nothing isn’t. It’s a comedy because it ends happily, but nearly does not.
Likely performed first at the Garter Feast on St. George’s Day, in Greenwich, following the election of the new knights, preceding their installation at Windsor, The Merry Wives of Windsor has gentlewomen outsmarting one knight while teaching their husbands a lesson. As in so many Shakespearean comedies, the women are wittier than the men and act as the real rulers of society, but here their wit instructs the knights-elect in the audience, who are brought to witness the hazards of being laughable. The story goes that Queen Elizabeth, who had delighted in Sir John Falstaff as the most memorable comic figure in the English History Plays, wanted to see him in love. Since Falstaff is by nature incapable of being ‘in love,’ loving only food and drink, sex and money, Shakespeare entangles him in not one but two love triangles, which are really sex triangles as far as the rotund and covetous knight is concerned.
An English comedy might well turn on comic twists of the English language. This one does, throughout, with word-benders foreign and domestic hacking their way into the weeds of self-deception. At the outset, Justice of the Peace Robert Shallow complains of abuses of English law he’s suffered at the hands of Sir John. His cousin, Slender, reverses the meanings of “successors” and “ancestors”—deranging time, that course upon which legitimacy in both law courts (with their respect for precedent) and marriages (with their need for heirs) both run. Meanwhile, the Welsh parson, Hugh Evans, mixes up “luces,” a species of fish, with “louses,” a species of insect; the parson verbally deranges not time but nature. As a churchman he stands ready to reconcile legalist Justice Shallow and lawless Sir John, but the judge would rather keep things out of the divine realm and take the case to the Star Chamber. Parson Evans then falls back on the attempt to deflect the men’s attention toward a plot to marry Slender to Anne Page, a young lady of substantial dowry. If the churchman can’t overcome Shallow’s natural anger with divinely blessed peacemaking, he might do it with natural love.
They knock on the door of the father of Miss Page, but Falstaff is there, reviving Justice Shallow’s animosity. “He hath wrong’d me, Master Page” (I.i.91). He has beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge. Indeed I have, Falstaff replies in his own defense, but the Council will laugh at your charges. In the mind of Sir John, property claims in men, beasts, and buildings made by commoners will amount to very little among his fellow aristocrats. Slender has his own charges against Falstaff’s companion, Pistol, whom he alleges to have picked his pocket. Slender draws a sober lesson from the experience: “I’ll ne’er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company, for this trick. If I be drunk, I’ll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.” (I.i.162-66). In Slender, Pastor Evans has found a pious soul indeed, hoping to be Spirit-filled when next spirits-filled.
“The question is concerning your marriage,” Pastor Evans declares (I.i.197-98), getting things back on track. Imitating the court-language he would have picked up from his cousin on ‘the reasonable man,’ Slender allows that “I will marry her upon any reasonable demands” (I.i.102-03)—specifically, the command of the justice of the peace, whom Slender purposes to obey as if he were his father. But the pastor wants dimwitted Slender to love, not to reason: “Let us command to know that of your mouth or of your lips; for divers philosophers hold that the lips is parcel of the mouth” (I.i.204-07). For the first “mouth” he means “mind”; as for the second “mouth,” he is right literally—the lips can be considered part of the mouth—while contradicting his first assertion, which distinguishes merely verbal assurances from the true intent of the mind. In his Welshman’s mangling of English, he continues to garble nature. He defines love agapically—”can you carry your goot will to the maid? (I.i.207-08)—while Justice Shallow defines it more naturally, more mundanely—”can you love her?” (I.i.209). Slender remains the man of reason who cannot think for himself: “I hope, sir, I will do as it shall become one that would reason,” a human being, a rational animal (I.i.210-11). At further prompting, Slender avers to his cousin with malaproprian determination, “I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance” (I.i.220-22); of that “I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely” (I.i.225-26). “I think my cousin meant well,” Justice Shallow construes (I.i.229).
The audience first sees Falstaff at The Garter Inn, his natural habitat, where he drinks in the presence of the inn’s Host, along with Sir John’s four sometime partners in crime. He plots the seduction of Mrs. Ford, the wife of a substantial Windsor citizen; “she gives the leer of invitation” to me (I.iii.41)—a supposition his confederate Pistol takes to be wishful. “He hath studied her well, and translated her will out of honesty into English” (I.iii.45-46). In his own way truly English, Sir John’s motive isn’t so much erotic as economic; the lady “has all the rule of her husband’s purse” (I.iii.49-50). As if to illustrate how dishonest English can be, Falstaff reads a love letter he has composed both to Mrs. Ford and the equally rich Mrs. Page, its language a parody of the English one reads in a medieval romance or a poem by Dante. In Falstaff, chivalry is dead, money’s what counts and what one counts, aristocracy has reached its comedic nadir.
Unfortunately for Sir John, there really is no honor among thieves. Pistol will tattle on Falstaff, doubtless angling for a material reward for himself.
The audience next meets the other rival suitors for the hand of Miss Page. They are Dr. Caius, a French physician, and Fenton, a young gentleman. Dr. Caius mistakes Pastor Evans as his rival; the pastor has sent a message to the doctor’s acquaintance, Mistress Quickly, asking her to intervene with Miss Page on behalf of Slender’s suit, and the doctor assumes he must be angling for himself. For her part, mischievous Mistress Quickly separately assures both Caius and Fenton that Miss Page loves him and him alone, although she dismisses Fenton’s chances: “I know Anne’s mind as well as another does” (I.iv.147-48).
Falstaff’s identical letters meet with the indignation of both respectable married ladies. They plot revenge upon him. But in one respect they differ. Mrs. Ford’s husband is a jealous man; Mrs. Page’s husband is not, and his disposition is not improved when Falstaff’s false pals inform him of Falstaff’s intentions toward his wife and her alleged attraction to him. Therefore, the wives’ counterplot against Falstaff’s scheming must not only punish Falstaff but correct Ford. Eventually, they will need to run three counterplots, one after the other, as Sir John persists in his lechery and avarice, and Ford remains adamant in his jealousy.
Letters are composed of words, which are composed of letters, all capable of being rearranged for comic effect, usually by provoking anger, whether the indignation is righteous, foolish, or both at the same time. When Falstaff describes Mr. Ford as a peasant, cuckold, and knave to Ford disguised as another man, Ford sputters with fury at the imagined infidelity of his wife and the verbal affronts to his honor. When the French doctor challenges the Welsh parson to a duel over Anne Page, Justice Shallow asks, mockingly, “What, the sword and the word! Do you study them both, Master Parson?” (III.i.40-41). The Host arrives at the dueling site and plays the real peacemaker: “Disarm them, and let them question; let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English” (III.i.70-71). Let there be peace between “soul-curer and body-curer” (III.i.89). “Am I politic? am I subtle? am I a Machiavel? Shall I lose my doctor? No; he gives me the potions and the motions. Shall I lose my parson, my priest, my Sir Hugh? No; he gives me the pro-verbs and no-verbs,” the ‘dos’ and the ‘don’ts’ (III.i.91-95). Since verbs are words of action and actions speak louder than words, Gentlemen, do nothing injurious to one another. The Host gets at the essence of comedy, if not the Word of God.
In the first of the ladies’ counterplots against Falstaff, they lure him to Ford’s house. He woos Mrs. Ford but she proves the more adroit manipulator of words: “Well, heaven knows how I love you,” she accurately replies to his suit; “and you shall one day find it,” she rightly predicts (III.iii.69-70). “Keep in that mind; I’ll deserve it,” Falstaff returns, condemning himself unknowingly. When on cue Mrs. Page approaches, announcing the imminent arrival of Mr. Ford, they hide Falstaff in a laundry basket and have him carted away, with instructions to the servants to dump him in the Thames. This reprises the scene in Aristophanes’ The Clouds in which Socrates is hoisted up toward the heavens in a basket; the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is Socrates as Aristophanes portrays him, a ridiculously false claimant to wisdom. His baptism in good English waters won’t cleanse his soul.
For his second go at Mrs. Ford (urged upon him by the duplicitous Mistress Quickly), Falstaff again shows up at the Ford house. He falls for the same routine, as Mrs. Page arrives to warn of Mr. Ford’s approach. This time they disguise him as a woman for, as Mrs. Page tells her friend, “We cannot misuse him enough. / We’ll leave a proof, by that which we will do, / Wives may be merry and yet honest too” (IV.ii.88-91). That is, the proof of wit and honor won’t be in ever-elusive, ever-manipulable words, the things to which Mr. Ford gives too much credence, but in irrefutable actions. When the self-beleaguered Ford does arrive, he’s told that the disguised Falstaff is his wife maid’s aunt, a witch, a fortune-teller, a spell-caster—that is, an abuser of words who exploits the witless. Out-witted and gulled once again by words, Ford beats ‘her’ out of his house, thus expediting the escape of the man he expected to capture in flagrante.
Finally told of his own folly, Ford reforms, acknowledging his wife’s honor and chastising himself with such vigor that Mr. Page intervenes to tell him to “be not as extreme in submission as in offense” (IV.iv.11). But bruised, humiliated Falstaff still won’t give up. As water and blows haven’t worked, the ladies turn to spiritual terror and a suggestion of hellfire. Mrs. Page recalls a legend of Windsor Forest, an old wives’ tale about Herne the Hunter, the late gamekeeper, whose spirit returns every winter, decked with “great ragg’d horns,” changing the milk in cows to blood and frightening all those who see him (IV.iv.30). She proposes that they tell Falstaff to rendezvous with them in the forest, disguised as Herne. They will arrange for local children disguised as urchins, elves, and fairies to encircle him, dance, pinch him and burn him with candles. After “the unclean knight” has been so tormented, “we’ll all present ourselves; dis-horn the spirit, / And mock him home to Windsor” (IV.iv.56, 63-64). Pastor Evans pronounces this a set of “fery honest knaveries” (IV.iv.79-80).
Meanwhile, Sir John is concealing his most recent humiliation, defending his remaining illusions of aristocratic honor with lying verbiage. The Host of the Garter Inn hears that a fat old woman has gone up to Falstaff’s room. Falstaff claims that yes, there was a woman, but she is gone now, after having “taught me more wit than ever I learned before in my life, and I paid nothing for it neither, but was paid for my learning” (IV.v.54-56). This is another parody of the life of Socrates, who tells the tale of Diotima, his teacher in the philosophy of love. Socratic eros begins with love of beautiful bodies, ascends to love of beautiful souls, and culminates in the love of “beauty as a whole,” of philo-sophia, the love of wisdom. Falstaff indeed would do well to begin his ascent on this ladder of love, but he will need a hard-earned lesson in modest practical wisdom before he can aspire to the heights.
He isn’t the only erotic schemer in Windsor. All of Anne Page’s suitors know she will participate in the Falstaff-tormenting fairy dance. Each plans to spirit her away. Mr. Page tells Slender that his daughter will appear in white; Mrs. Page tells Dr. Caius that she’ll be dressed in green. Anne has feigned to consent to both parents, but she’s written to her favorite, Fenton, saying that others will be dressed in those costumes and that she will elope with him.
All goes according to the lovers’ plan, as inscribed within Anne’s parents’ plan. Slender makes off with the figure in white, Caius with the figure in green, Anne and Fenton with one another to a waiting vicar. Falstaff receives his just reward, after Anne, as the Fairy Queen, intones, “Evil be to him that evil thinks” (V.v.67). Here at last the right words fit the right deeds, as the children, singing “Lust is but a bloody fire,” singe the old bounder with candles. Duly mocked, Falstaff admits to having been an ass, while Ford vows never to distrust his wife again. When Pastor Evans mocks Falstaff in his heavy Welsh accent, Falstaff exclaims, “Have I liv’d to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?” (V.v.136-37). He has, indeed, and as Anne Page as the Fairy Queen has suggested, it’s the thought that makes language and action good or bad. Mr. Page promises him forgiveness at the price of further ridicule at dinner.
But what of the deceived suitors? Slender reports first, complaining that the fairy he ran off with was “a great lubberly boy” and, compounding the indignity, the son of a postmaster (V.v.176). Slender resolutely attempts to salvage a shred of dignity by averring, “If I had been married to him, for all he was in woman’s apparel, I would not have had him” (V.v.182-83). Deceived by words and apparel, he can at least uphold the natural standard. Dr. Caius wasn’t so lucky. The French physician didn’t identify the nature of his ‘bride’ until the ceremony had finished. “I’ll raise all Windsor,” he declaims, a move that may not improve his reputation in the town (V.v.197).
As Mr. Ford understates it, “This is strange” (V.v.200). “Who hath got the right Anne?” (V.v.200). The young lady herself stops by, husband by her side, asking her parents’ pardon for her disobedience. Fenton offers the apologia for love according to the principles of nature fake-Socratic Falstaff could never learn from his fake Diotima—that is, from himself. “You would have married her most shamefully, / Where there was no proportion held in love” (V.v.208-09). In love reciprocity is the natural way, as indeed the merrily indignant wives and the jealous husband had understood, when thinking of themselves and the rogue knight. Not only nature but God is on the true lovers’ side: “Th’ offense is holy that she hath committed; / And this deceit loses the name of craft, / Of disobedience, or unduteous title, / Since therein she doth evitate and shun / A thousand irreligious cursed hours, / Which forced marriage would have brought upon her” (V.v.212-17). Even Falstaff sees this, saying to the Pages, “I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanc’d” (V.v.221-22). Both Fenton and Falstaff have spoken in better English than any Slender or Caius could have offered, and the Pages, defeated at their own game of wit against each other and against their daughter’s good, concede defeat with grace and good humor. Mr. Ford is satisfied that he will sleep tonight with Mrs. Ford.
Shakespeare’s English comedy defends the right use of the English language, the right use of convention in the service of just love, love in proportion, the reciprocal love that animates the reciprocal rule of a husband and a wife over their household. The Falstaff of the comedy differs from the Falstaff of the history plays; he is ‘lower,’ less clever, because in the histories he operates in the presence of warring kings, whom he cannot underestimate, while here he finds himself in the presence of mere gentrymen and women, whom he can and does underestimate. Commercial, no longer aristocratic, English civil society lends itself to comedy in its denizens’ readiness to make sharp deals by hawking falsely advertised merchandise. In this kind of society, where there are no lions but plenty of foxes, nature as seen in love must live by the wits of true lovers. They can triumph, achieve comedy’s happy ending, but only if their prudence in plotting counter-deceptions equals their ardor.
The Continental regimes enjoy no peace. They are always warring or preparing for war. The aristocrats are noble or, in one instance, evil, not figures of fun. The witticisms have sharper points. Love and marriage unite ruling families, not merely prosperous ones, and a failed courtship might ruin an alliance, incite a war. Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy without merriment. It ends happily, but only just. The fathers here are rulers, not merchants, and there are no mothers; the women are witty and good (more precisely, one is more witty than good, the other more good than witty), but they are daughters and nieces, and do not rule the action.
Leonato is the governor of Messina in the Kingdom of Sicily. Don Pedro is a prince of Aragon, under which kingdom Sicily thrived as a subordinate but largely self-governing regime. Aragon itself had merged with Castile in 1479, forming the nucleus of modern Spain, Tudor England’s great rival. The Spanish Armada had sailed only ten years before Shakespeare wrote the play.
Don Pedro arrives in Messina in triumph, having won a battle as it were comically, happily, his troops having suffered few casualties. “A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers” (I.i.7-8), Leonato tells his daughter, Hero, and his niece, Beatrice—eligible young ladies who themselves might well be ‘doubled’ or married to eligible suitors. They hear that a young Florentine named Claudio has acquitted himself well in the fight, “doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion” (I.i.12). He will prove a fitting hero for Hero. As for Beatrice, she inquires about a “Signor Mountanto,” by whom she means Signor Benedick of Padua, a man she denigrates as a trencherman and lover-boy (both his name and his nickname suggests as much), leaving the audience wondering why a lady of her stature would inquire after such a nullity. But he is no nullity, the messenger from Don Pedro insists; he is a man of virtue, a brave soldier. Ah, but “You must not, sir, mistake my niece; there is a kind of merry war betwixt Signor Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them” (I.i.53-54). Beatrice immediately claims near-total victory in their last war of words, after which “four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man govern’d with one,” leaving him at best human-all-too-human, “a reasonable creature” but little more (I.i.58-59, 62-63). Serves him right, too, as he “wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block” (I.i.66-67).
Claudio loves Hero, openly. Benedick exchanges verbal arrows with Beatrice, concluding, “I will live a bachelor” (I.i.213). Don Pedro wisely doubts it. But Claudio has no inclination to camouflage his feelings: Having looked upon Hero “with a soldier’s eye” before the war, having “had a rougher task in hand / Than to drive liking to the name of love,” upon returning, with “war-thoughts… left in their places vacant, in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is, / Saying I lik’d her ere I went to wars” (I.i.261-67). Don Pedro promises to intervene with Leonato and Hero on his friend’s behalf.
But Don Pedro’s bastard brother, Don John, resents his brother’s patronage. “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace” (I.ii.22)—a sentiment anticipating Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. And like Satan, Don John knows himself: “It must not be denied that I am a plain-dealing villain” (I.ii.25-26), who, “if I had my liberty, I would do my liking” (I.ii.28-29). Don John is an aristocrat who defines liberty like a democrat, as doing whatever he wants. Upon hearing that his brother has negotiated the beginning of a courtship between Claudio and Hero, he vows, “If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way” (I.ii.58). He has no interest in the lovers whose happiness he would ruin, wanting only to injure his gracious brother. To him, the lovers are mere collateral damage. Unlike Falstaff, his vice is unnatural; he is not so much a bad man as an evil one who would ruin both brotherly love and chaste erotic love.
For her part, Beatrice echoes Benedick’s anti-marital vow. “Not till God make men of some other metal than earth” shall she take one as her husband (II.i.51-52). More wittily, “Adam’s sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred” (II.i.55-56)—and there is indeed a touch of brotherly-sisterly raillery in the repartee of the obviously well-matched pair.
Don John’s first plot against his brother has him lie to Claudio, telling him that Don Pedro really woos Hero for himself. When he confides his anger to Benedick, the scheme quickly dissolves, as Benedick tells Don Pedro, who announces the real result of his suit, confirmed by Leonato: “Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes; his Grace hath made the match, and all grace say Amen to it!” (II.i.271-72). So the romance seems to conclude, with joy. Don Pedro then purposes to exercise his matchmaking skills on a harder challenge posed by Benedick and Beatrice, enlisting Claudio and Hero as his allies.
But Don John won’t surrender. I will “cross this marriage” (II.ii.7), thanks to a plan thought up by his follower, Borachio. Borachio’s lover is Margaret, one of Hero’s gentlelady attendants. If Don John can arrange to have Don Pedro and Claudio near her chamber window at night, Borachio will address her as Hero, letting them ‘discover’ Hero’s infidelity. This scheme has the advantage over Don John’s abortive one, as it arranges for its victims to see and hear for themselves.
At the same time, Don Pedro plots his own much more benevolent deception of Benedick, letting it drop that Beatrice is secretly in love with her verbal fencing partner. Don Pedro deplores the lady’s unwisdom in this, but Leonato, who’s in on the scheme, excuses his niece, saying, “O my lord, wisdom and blood combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs to one that blood hath the victory” (II.iii.150-51). Claudio chimes in with the claim that Hero has told him that poor Beatrice will surely die if Benedick continues to spurn her. Don Pedro adds, “I love Benedick well; and I could wish he would modestly examine himself, to see how much he is unworthy of so good a lady” (II.iii.189-90). This combined appeal to Benedick’s real if unrealized love for Beatrice, his Christian humility combined with his aristocratic pride (sure to make him want to prove that he is indeed worthy of so good a lady), has exactly the intended effect on the young nobleman, who has been ‘secretly’ (so he imagines) listening in to the well-planned conversation. “If I do not take pity of her,” he tells himself, “I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew” (II.iii.239-40). “I will go get her picture,” that is, go see her and fall more fully in love (II.iii.240-41).
And Hero goes to work on Beatrice, with the identical strategy: a conversation with her other attendant, Ursula, fashioned for the ears of her ‘eavesdropping’ friend, whom she describes as too prideful and self-absorbed to respond to Benedick’s love, which she has duly reported. “Nature never fram’d a woman’s heart / Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice. / Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, / Misprising what they look on; and her wit / Values itself so highly that to her / All matter else seems weak.” (III.i.50-54). After they leave, Beatrice steps forward, ashamed of herself and ready to requite Benedick’s love. Later, Hero will see that she’s come down to natural equality with others of their sex, “look[ing] with your eyes as other women do” when they are in love (III.iv.81-82).
At this point, Benedick and Beatrice are well on the way to a comedic finale, but Claudio and Hero have been charted as firmly toward a tragic end as Romeo and Juliet are, by as malignant a villain. Enter, however, a band of English-like clowns who will blunder themselves into saving the day. Constable Dogberry selects a night-watch, charging them to guard Leonato’s door, “for the wedding being there tomorrow,” there must be no disturbance tonight (III.iii.84). From this post, the watchmen hear Borachio tell another of Don John’s followers how well his scheme worked, how Don Pedro and Claudio heard him courting Margaret-as-Hero, with Claudio swearing that he would go to the wedding ceremony and expose her betrayal to all the guests. The watchmen determine to report this, “the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth,” to the good Constable (III.iii.152-53). Initially, however, when Dogberry attempts to tell Leonato of the plot, he is too buffoonish to get to the point, and the governor can only tell him to go back and complete his investigation of the men he’s arrested.
At the church, Claudio accuses Hero (“She’s but the sign and semblance of her honor”); Don Pedro testifies against her (“upon my honor”); Don John condemns her vices as being beyond the “chastity” of language to be uttered in polite company; her father wishes she were dead or better, never born (IV.i.32,87,96). Under the weight of these sudden, false accusations, Hero collapses. Among the nobles, only Benedick doubts the charge; only Beatrice defends her.
But unlike the notoriously foolish, corrupt, ineffectual clergymen elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays, the Friar who was to have performed the marriage ceremony shows perception (“I have marked / A thousand blushing apparitions / To start into her face”), prefers not to exclaim or declaim, and speaks with the authority of both religion and experience without expecting any to defer to him on account of them (IV.i.158-60), while insisting that “there is some strange misprision in the princes” (IV.i.185). This gives Benedick an opening to express suspicion of “John the Bastard, / Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies” (IV.i.189), which in turn makes Leonato doubt his daughter’s accusers: ” If they wrong her honor, / The proudest of them shall well hear of it” (IV.i.191-92). That is, he will chastise even a prince of the kingdom that rules, albeit lightly, over the kingdom in which he governs one region. The same honor that inspires aristocrats to defend their countries and their allies stands in defense of their families, and if family honor is impugned civic honor will be shaken.
Harmless as a dove, but prudent as a serpent, only Friar Francis sees the way to satisfy the requirements of honor and to defend civic peace, a way that exists because human nature is what it is, a way that the Friar sees because he understands human nature and also knows how it may be brought to follow justice. “Pause awhile, / And let my counsel sway you in this case” (IV.i.200-01). Hero has fainted and her accusers have walked out; let them believe her to be dead. This alone will change “slander to remorse” (IV.i.211). Hero will be “lamented, pitied, and excus’d, / Of every hearer; for it so falls out / That we have we prize not to the worth / Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, / Why, then we rack the value, then we find / The virtue that possession would not show us / Whiles it was ours. So it will fare with Claudio.” (IV.i.216-22). Benedick puts his own honor on the line, telling Leonato that he will find a way to vindicate his daughter.
But first he must deal with his enraged fiancée, who demands that he kill Claudio. This is her love test, set for the man she’d accused of waywardness at the beginning of the play. In her ferocity, she wishes she were a man so that she could “eat his heart in the marketplace”—a use of the marketplace that would not occur to the English at Windsor. Although he tries to calm her, she extracts a vow to challenge the calumniator. Again, tragedy threatens.
Fortunately, the forces of the English common law, remarkably at play in Messina, are still on the case. Constable Dogberry calls his officers to order, inquiring, “Is our whole dissembly appear’d?” (IV.ii.2). Dissembling schemers Borachio and his accomplice, Conrade, are indeed present, and the interrogation of the accused and their accusers wends its way eccentrically toward establishing the facts of the case. They report back to the governor’s house in time to interrupt Benedick, who has duly challenged Claudio, then departed. Borachio confesses. But Leonato continues his own plot, telling Claudio that although innocent Hero is dead, he has a niece who looks just like her, who stands to inherit not only his own estate but the estate of his brother, Antonio. Claudio happily accepts the substitute wife (it is a comedy, after all), and the wedding is set for the morrow.
As for Benedick, he must return to a conversation with a lady who expects him to return with his shield or on it. He returns with it, his shield being his wit. After telling her that he has indeed challenged Claudio, who will either answer it or be deemed a coward, he distracts her from her anger by reinitiating their badinage, asking her to say “for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?” (V.ii.52-53). Why, “for all of them together; which maintain’d so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them” (V.ii.54-56)—an anticipation of the kind of arguments Publius will unfold in Federalist 51. This will be a marriage of separate and balanced powers.
“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,” Benedick remarks (V.ii.63). Hardly so on your side, the maid replies, since the wise man rarely praises himself by calling himself wise. “An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that liv’d in the time of good neighbors; if a man do not erect in this time his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps” (V.ii.66-69). Benedick is an aristocrat who understands the modern world, where humility no longer wins honor because neighbors no longer know or love you. For once Beatrice can bring no ready counter-witticism to mind. When Ursula interrupts with the news that Hero was falsely accused, Don Pedro and Claudio abused, and that Don John has fled the country, they hurry to the governor’s house.
There, Hero unmasks herself, as Leonato explains, “she died…but whiles her slander lived” (V.iii.66); her slander now dead, her honor vindicated thanks to the Friar’s wise ruse, she has risen. She will marry Claudio. And after a bit more verbal sparring, which they begin by telling one another that they love one another “no more than reason” (V.iii.75,78), Benedick and Beatrice are kindly exposed by the newlyweds, who produce letters from each confessing love for the other. “A miracle!” Benedick pronounces it. “Here’s our own hands against our hearts” (V.iii.91). He silences any more less-than-beatific chatter by kissing his bride-to-be; the man Beatrice had derided as Signor Mountanto delivers a sermon from the mount in loving action, winning their war of words as surely as he had won the war which preceded the play’s beginning. That makes two miracles, uniting two couples; Much Ado About Nothing is as close to a divine comedy as Shakespeare would ever write.
When Leonato tries to delay a celebratory dance, Benedick makes bold to countermand his order, telling him to get a wife, as “there is no staff more reverend than one tipp’d with horn,” a merry joke about cuckoldry in the wake of one wedding and in prospect of his own (V.iii.117-19). A messenger then brings word that Don John has been captured and will return to Messina tomorrow, under armed guard. It isn’t Governor Leonato but Benedick who concludes, “Think not on him till tomorrow. I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers.” (V.iii.121-23).
And why not? He and Beatrice were the first among the aristocrats to suspect Don John’s perfidy, Hero’s innocence, and the others’ error. Although decent Claudio and Hero are the heirs to the fortune of the Governor and his brother, Benedick and Beatrice will be the real rulers of the city, as the wittiest and wisest aristocrats in town. A victory is twice itself when the victor brings home full number, Leonato had intoned. He has just been shown how his aphorism might be enacted.
In his English comedy, Shakespeare shows how a decadent aristocracy in a peaceful, commercial society can be well supplanted by the wit of the gentry class or upper ‘bourgeoisie’—crucially, by the wit of women, wives whose virtues can now rule because commerce has supplanted war. But on the continent, wars will continue. In Shakespeare’s continental comedy, the witty woman needs to find her match in an equally witty, or even wittier man. And even they will need the assistance of a wise, politic churchman who knows how to moderate the tempers of still-indispensable warrior-aristocrats while awaiting the ascendance of the better angels of their nature. In commercial England, a tavern host serves as peacemaker, the parson as a good-natured foreign language-bender.
In England, English words prove unreliable in dealings commercial and marital; actions speak louder. On the continent, words might prove unreliable, lying, but also whetstones of wit; actions bespeak love (a kiss to silence a too-contentious mouth) and harmony (a betrothal dance). In England, love requires the wit of deception to defend itself against the low, farcical eroticism commerce encourages. On the continent, love requires the wit of perception to defend itself against malignant scheming and excessive aristocratic spiritedness. In England, wit and prudence defend love against base assaults and surmises; on the continent, they defend love by contriving ‘miracles’.
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