And we’re back! Thank you so much for your patience during this unexpectedly long hiatus, and welcome to new readers. I will be sticking to a bi-weekly update schedule for the time being. If you’re looking for your Shakespeare fix in the off weeks, please check another project I’ve been working on, the podcast this shakespeare is gay. It’s a little more irreverent than this newsletter, but I hope you’ll still enjoy it.
Oddly and a little endearingly, King Charles I annotated his copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio with the names of key characters in certain plays— maybe to remind himself of which characters were associated with some of the more obscurely titled plays, or as suggestions for better titles. For Much Ado About Nothing, the annotation is obvious: Bennedike and Betrice. Benedick and Beatrice. It’s difficult to separate them, but that’s entirely the point.
beginning
Benedick, odd as it may seem, is a soldier. In As You Like It, in the famous speech detailing the phases of a man’s life, the soldier is one of them; it’s representative, for Shakespeare, less of a profession than of a type. A man who is passionate, ambitious, and most of all, not yet settled into family life and maturity. A man whose closest bonds are to other men. The details of the mysterious war Benedick and the other soldiers are returning from at the beginning of the play are entirely irrelevant and never explained. The most important feature is that it is not, apparently, ongoing. They are not bound for the battlefield as soon as they leave the idyllic Messina. They are not going back to what they used to do, and be.
Beatrice is there, of course. Her comic verbal sparring with Benedick defines the tone of the play from its opening moments: we meet him through her descriptions of him before we see him in the flesh. We know, with the certainty of centuries of romances, that their protestations against love, specifically for each other, will not survive the play. But for Benedick, it is even more deliberately a moment of potential change. He is no longer a soldier, and must become something new—the question is what.
middle
There is a choice to make in the middle of the play, though Benedick does not actually, in the end, have to make it. Will Benedick choose war, or love? Men, or women? Claudio, or Beatrice? The tools to turn Much Ado About Nothing into a tragedy are in Benedick’s hands, if only he were to actually try to fight and kill Claudio. Once that happens, nothing’s ending well, no matter which of them triumphs.
The choice that Beatrice offers him presents his two lives— past soldier, future lover— as mutually exclusive impossibilities. You can’t be loyal to your friends and to your lover at the same time. Purely visually, Benedick has already allied himself with the women and civilians of this play: he stands beside them and speaks for them at Hero and Claudio’s wedding, and when Don Pedro, Don John, and Claudio storm off in fury, Benedick remains behind. He has broken from the other soldiers already. Beatrice is only asking him to make it official, irrevocable— to establish that moving into a new phase of life means leaving the other behind forever.
But Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy, and so Benedick is spared that rupture. He actually does offer to fight Claudio, but events intervene before he’s called upon to do anything about it, and they can brush the whole thing off with a joke in the play’s final moments—because they’re kinsmen now, cousins by marriage. The choice between their old, martial family and their new, married ones conveniently merges into a single option, a new way for their fraternity to be reaffirmed and safely held within acceptable social structures.
end
Why, at the very end of the play, does Benedick try to go back? This baffles me every time I see it, when we’re minutes—seconds—away from the end of the play, and for some reason Beatrice and Benedick both balk and pretend that we don’t all already know they’re in love.
After all his bluster, Benedick finds himself unexpectedly uncertain of the feelings he and Beatrice have already confessed to one another. He suddenly cannot recognize a masked Beatrice (‘Which is Beatrice?’) and, in striking contrast to his confidence in the face of her protestations of dislike in the wake of the first, disrupted wedding, he is now unsure of what she really wants. Beatrice takes advantage of her new unreadability to make one last attempt to avoid confessing her feelings to the community, and Benedick is either genuinely persuaded by her claims, or happy to go along with her denial and spare himself the other men’s mockery. The mask (or, more commonly in performance, veil) that Beatrice enters wearing seems to conceal both her face and her heart, rendering Benedick uncertain as to whether the woman he has already claimed is, in fact, available to him. He didn’t actually fulfill his vow to kill Claudio, didn’t actually break away from what he used to be. Does he still get to become a lover now?
What settles the impasse, in a play where everyone has spent the past few hours realizing that men can’t trust women’s faces and women can’t trust men’s vows? A letter, of course. Leave behind promises, leave behind fraternity and sorority, and turn to the only thing left: the word of your own hand, written when you thought no one but you would ever read it. These are the only love confessions that cannot be denied or misconstrued.
So what does it say? What are the words that can convince any lover, the language of truth and promise that can actually be believed, the poem that will let you pledge to become a new self and really mean it? Well, we never get to know.
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Your point here about the mutually exclusive impossibilities of the past soldier, future lover decision is making me think about the final lines of the play as well.... Brave punishments and dancing cannot, according to Benedick, exist in the same time or space either. A bit of an echo of Beatrice there that I hadn't thought about before!