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Shockingly, Beatrice and Benedick are the only couple in all of Shakespearean comedy who have a shared history. It is as close as Shakespeare comes to showing modern romantic life, the rituals of courtship and dating between single people. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice therefore your Grace may well say I have lost it.īeatrice equivocates brilliantly, but it is clear that Benedick gambled Beatrice’s “double heart” with his “single one.” Whether he has gambled with her chastity or not (presumed sex is the hinge on which the other plot, between Claudio and Leonato’s daughter Hero, turns) Beatrice and Benedick have clearly had an adult relationship. “Come, lady, come,” Don Pedro says to Beatrice during the play’s centerpiece, the masked ball, “you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick.” “Indeed, my lord,” she replies,Į lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it-a double heart for his single one. Auden puts it, Beatrice and Benedick “are the most lovable, amusing and good people” that Shakespeare ever created, “the characters of Shakespeare we’d most like to sit next to at dinner.” (The lack of modern-day Benedicks is a subject for another time.) As W.H. Darcy, to Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, to modern-day Beatrices such as Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock. The sound of their conversational witticisms is intensely familiar, the prototype for every romantic couple that works their way from hatred to love, from Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Instead of Shakespeare’s elevated verse, Beatrice and Benedick speak almost entirely in prose. The play sparks to life when Benedick sees and begins arguing with Beatrice, Leonato’s resolutely single niece, with whom he is locked in an ongoing verbal feud. Pedro is accompanied by the glowering Don John, his rebellious, illegitimate brother Claudio, a valiant young nobleman and Benedick, a confirmed bachelor.
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The play begins with Don Pedro, the Prince, arriving at the estate of Leonato, the Governor of Messina, after winning a nearby military campaign.
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In a miracle of Shakespearean characterization, the characters themselves seem surprised by their sober responsibilities, their newfound maturity and depth. The characters wake up from their lubricated nights of revelry to a new morning that shines a harsh light on their world and relations in it.
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Shakespeare surprises us, however, with the unexpectedly sober and mature events that transpire roughly halfway through the play. The action, unfolding between military expeditions, is imbued with the rambunctious feeling of soldiers who hit the town on shore leave. The first three acts are dominated by a house party on a lavish estate, a wild masquerade poised precipitously on the verge of spinning out of control. The atmosphere is frothy and insistently social, almost inebriated, drunk on wordplay. This southern Mediterranean island setting may help to explain Much Ado’s hothouse climate-it is one of Shakespeare’s most playful and erotic plays. Unlike the rainy, gray, Protestant city of London, Messina was sunny, colorful and Catholic, alive to sounds and rhythms only wildly imagined in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience.
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A play set in Italy promised a full and entertaining afternoon, equal parts titillation and danger. For Shakespeare’s audience, the Mediterranean existed somewhere on the outer limits of European civilization, less a concrete place than an exotic symbol. Shakespeare sets Much Ado About Nothing in Messina, a small city in Sicily under the control of the Spanish crown.