Much Ado: Notes (2)

Hearsay, Fashion and Calumny

• Hearsay as healer: Benedick and Beatrice
  • Motivation? Where is the love-juice?
  • Are the conversions comical or farcical?
  • A sandwich: Benedick (1) "Her hair shall be of what colour it please God" (2.3.33)
    • He lists the qualities of the ideal woman -- and they fit Beatrice, apart from the requirement "mild."
  • The song: "Men were deceivers ever" (2.3.61 ff)
  • Comic business in the scene, as the men improvise
  • Sandwich, part two: Benedick (2) "This can be no trick" (2.3.217)
    • The splendid affirmation "She must be requited," and the comic rationalization: "the world must be peopled"
  • The disproportioned interlude, where Beatrice is her accustomed spiky self, but Benedick manages to "spy some signs of love" in her: 2.3.242 ff.
  • Beatrice's turn: what differences in the scene? (3.1) [illustration]
    • The scene is in verse, not prose -- more lyrical
    • Benedick is flattered by the alleged love of Beatrice for him; Beatrice is scolded for her pride and "self-endearment"
  • "What fire is in mine ears?" (3.1.107)
• Hearsay as destroyer: "The lady is disloyal" (3.2.98) [video]
  • Branagh finds another way to make Claudio's brutality in the wedding scene understandable
• Deformed Fashion: Dogberry and the Watch
  • Greenblatt on self-fashioning
  • Borachio on fashion -- the play's interest in change and the illogic of fashion
  • What is the function of the Dogberry scenes? [illustration]
    • The sign to the audience that all will go well -- but
    • The total ineptitude of the system to see that justice is done -- it is Borachio who confesses, not the Watch that finds out
• Hearsay as destroyer (2): Claudio's public accusation
  • Rotten oranges (4.1.31): conventional misogyny?
  • The intensity of language in Claudio's denunciation -- similar to tragedy
  • The similar outburst of Leonato, again "self-endearment"
  • Motivation again: stereotype or characterization in Claudio and Hero?
  • Counterpoints: Benedick remains when the men leave
  • The Friar's plot (does it work?)

Love Revealed?

• Benedick and the test of love: "Kill Claudio" (4.1.288) [videos]
  • A moment of astonishing unexpectedness: romantic love declared in the midst of what seems to be tragedy, and challenged by pushing the hero to kill his best friend
• The responses of Don Pedro and Clauio to Hero's "death" (5.1.166)
• Benedick challenges Claudio (5.1.143)
• The news of Borachio's confession (5.1.208 ff)

The Wolves Have Preyed

• Claudio recuperated: the tomb scene [illustration] [videos]
  • The original text (Quarto, in transcription)
  • And the Folio (facsimile)
• Beatrice and Benedick figure it out (5.4.71 ff): "I will stop your mouth" (5.4.96) [video]
• How well-suited are the couples at the end?

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This page last updated on 1 February 2009. © Michael Best, 2002.