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Much Ado About Nothing: Characters
Much Ado About Nothing character analysis for all 8 main characters – Beatrice, Benedick, Claudio, Hero, Don Pedro, Don John, Leonato and Dogberry. Each profile explores the character's psychology, motivation, and structural role within the play, supported throughout by a modern verse translation and key quotes. A complete character study guide and revision resource for GCSE, A-Level, AP English, IB, and undergraduate Shakespeare – equally useful to teachers and actors. Select a character below to begin.
Supporting Cast
Beyond the eight figures who carry the main action, Much Ado About Nothing has a household, a prince's retinue, a church, a watch, and a few people who are talked about but never seen. The wider cast is grouped below by where it belongs.
Leonato's Household
Antonio
Leonato's elderly brother, Hero's uncle and the only other old man in the play. At the masked ball Ursula recognises him by the waggling of his head and his dry hand, and he denies it twice. In A5S1 he is the one who cannot be held back: while Leonato challenges Claudio with dignity, Antonio calls the young men boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks and milksops, and has to be restrained by the brother he came to defend. In A5S4 he plays the father of the masked bride and gives Hero away as his own daughter.
Margaret
Hero's waiting-gentlewoman, quick, bawdy and fond of her own wit. She flirts with Balthasar at the ball, teases Hero on the wedding morning about being heavier by the weight of a man, and pricks Beatrice with the Benedictus pun. She is also Borachio's lover, and the woman who leans out of Hero's window in Hero's clothes while the prince and Claudio watch from the orchard. The play keeps that scene offstage and never has Margaret explain herself; Borachio swears she did not know what she did, and Leonato rules her in some fault, but against her will.
Ursula
Hero's other gentlewoman, steadier than Margaret and less talked about. She unmasks Antonio at the ball, and in A3S1 she is Hero's partner in the gulling of Beatrice, walking the orchard path and praising Benedick, who for shape, bearing, argument and valour goes foremost in report through Italy, while Beatrice listens in the honeysuckle. She coins the image of the fish cutting the silver stream with her golden oars. In A5S2 she brings Beatrice and Benedick the news that Hero has been cleared.
The Messenger
The soldier who opens the play with news that Don Pedro is three leagues from Messina and that a young Florentine called Claudio has done the feats of a lion in the figure of a lamb. He is Beatrice's first sparring partner, and loses: asked whether Benedick is a good soldier, he says a lord to a lord, a man to a man, and is told that Benedick is a stuffed man. A second messenger fetches Leonato to the wedding in A3S5, and a third reports Don John's capture in the play's last lines.
The Boy
Benedick's servant, sent in A2S3 to fetch a book from the chamber window and told, when he says he is here already, that his master would have him hence and here again. He has two lines. The book never arrives, because the prince and his friends do.
The Prince's Company
Balthasar
Don Pedro's attendant and singer. At the ball he courts Margaret and is told she says her prayers aloud. In A2S3 he protests that his voice will slander music, is coaxed by the prince, and sings Sigh no more, ladies, the play's statement that men were deceivers ever, while Benedick hides in the arbour and complains that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies. The prince asks him for music at Hero's window the next night, which is the night Borachio uses it. The First Folio names the singer in one direction as Jack Wilson, presumably the actor who sang the part.
Borachio
Don John's follower and the real author of the plot. He overhears the prince's plan while perfuming a musty room, proposes the window trick in A2S2 for a thousand ducats, and performs it with Margaret. In A3S3 he tells Conrade the whole story under a penthouse in the drizzle, digressing on fashion as a deformed thief, while the watch listen. Arrested, he confesses in full to the prince in A5S1, admitting that what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light, and asks for nothing but the reward of a villain. He also clears Margaret of any knowledge of the plot, the one generous act in the villains' camp.
Conrade
Don John's other follower, a gentleman by his own account and born under Saturn. In A1S3 he gives the villain the sensible advice to hide his discontent until he can show it safely, and is ignored. In A3S3 he is Borachio's audience for the confession, and his impatience with the lecture on fashion is one of the play's dry jokes. In A4S2 he calls Dogberry an ass, and the constable never forgives him.
The Church
Friar Francis
The priest who conducts both weddings. In A4S1 he watches Hero's face while the men accuse her, sees a thousand blushing apparitions and a thousand innocent shames, and concludes she is guiltless under some biting error. His plan, to report her dead so that slander turns to remorse, is the hinge of the second half: Come, lady, die to live. He is the one man in the church who notes rather than looks, and the play rewards him by letting him be right. In A5S4 he marries Hero to Claudio and promises to explain everything afterwards.
The Sexton
The town clerk, Francis Seacole, brought with pen and inkhorn to record the examination in A4S2. He is the only competent official in the scene, telling Dogberry that he goes not the way to examine and calling the watch to give their evidence. It is the sexton who puts the facts together, reports that Don John has fled and Hero has died, and carries the written examination to Leonato. The plot is solved on paper by a man who says almost nothing.
The Watch
Verges
The headborough, Dogberry's elderly partner, as honest, Dogberry says, as the skin between his brows. He agrees with everything, adds a word or two of his own that is usually the right one, and is apologised for at length: an old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt as Dogberry would desire. In A3S5 it is Verges who finally tells Leonato that the watch have taken two arrant knaves, and Dogberry who buries the news. He is the quiet half of the double act, and the half the audience trusts.
The Watchmen
George Seacole, who can read and write and is therefore given the lantern; Hugh Otecake; and the others, who decide that they would rather sleep than talk and sit on the church bench till two. Their orders are to avoid all trouble, and in avoiding it they overhear Borachio's confession and arrest him. One of them is convinced that a thief called Deformed is at large, because Borachio called fashion a deformed thief, and Deformed is still being hunted in the last act. They give their evidence in A4S2 plainly and correctly, which is more than anyone of rank manages.
The Absent and the Invented
Hero's Mother
Never seen. When Don Pedro says he thinks Hero is Leonato's daughter, Leonato answers that her mother hath many times told me so, and the play's long run of cuckold jokes begins with the father of the bride. Early editions give her a name in a stage direction; in this text she does not appear, and Hero has no woman of her own rank to speak for her in the church.
Antonio's Daughter
The bride Leonato offers Claudio as penance in A5S1: his brother's daughter, almost the copy of my child that's dead, and heir to both of them. She does not exist. Antonio has a son in A1S2 and no daughter anywhere, and the masked woman Claudio swears to marry is Hero. The invented niece is the device by which the comedy gives Hero back to the man who shamed her.
Deformed
A thief who wears a lock and borrows money in God's name, known to the watch for seven years. He is entirely their own invention, conjured from Borachio's remark that fashion is a deformed thief, and he grows more detailed every time he is mentioned: by A5S1 he has a key in his ear and a lock hanging by it. Dogberry asks the prince to examine Borachio upon that point. Nobody does.
Frequently asked questions about the characters in Much Ado About Nothing
Who are the main characters in Much Ado About Nothing?
The play has eight featured figures in two households. In Messina, Leonato is the governor whose house hosts the returning army; Hero is his only daughter and heir, courted by proxy and slandered at the altar; and Beatrice is his orphaned niece, the sharpest tongue in the play, locked in a merry war of wit with Benedick, a lord of Padua who has sworn never to marry.
Among the soldiers, Don Pedro is the Prince of Aragon, the play's matchmaker, who woos Hero for his favourite and plots to pair Beatrice with Benedick; Claudio is the young count of Florence who falls for Hero on sight and destroys her in church on the word of a stranger; and Don John is the prince's bastard brother, the plain-dealing villain who pays for the slander out of spite.
Outside both households is Dogberry, the constable of the watch, whose blundering watchmen overhear the plot and solve it. Around these eight are Antonio, Margaret, Ursula, Borachio, Conrade, Balthasar, Friar Francis, the Sexton, Verges and the Watch, grouped in the Supporting Cast section above.
What is the merry war between Beatrice and Benedick?
Leonato's phrase for it in the first scene is "kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her": the two never meet without a skirmish of wit, and Beatrice is mocking Benedick before he has even arrived, asking the messenger whether "Signior Mountanto" has come home from the wars. When he does arrive her opening shot is "I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you", and his is to call her Lady Disdain. She hints later that there was a history behind it, a heart he won of her with false dice; the play never explains.
The prince decides to end the war by trickery. Benedick hides in the orchard and overhears Leonato, Claudio and the prince discussing how Beatrice is dying of love for him, and talks himself round in a single speech ending "the world must be peopled". Beatrice overhears Hero and Ursula describe her as too proud ever to be told, and answers in her only verse soliloquy by bidding contempt and maiden pride farewell. Neither is persuaded by the gossip; each is told something true about themselves and minds.
William Hazlitt, in 1817, called the pair "both essences in their kind", and the play agrees: the merry war is the thing audiences have come for since the 1600s, and the two people fighting it are the only couple in Messina who choose each other.
Why does Beatrice say Kill Claudio?
Because she means it. The church has emptied, Hero lies accused and left for dead, and Benedick, of all the prince's men, has stayed behind. He tells her he loves nothing in the world so well as her; she answers "I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest"; and when he asks her to bid him do anything for her, she says "Kill Claudio". He laughs. She turns to go. Her next speech, that she would eat his heart in the market-place, and that she cannot be a man with wishing and so will die a woman with grieving, is the play's plainest statement of what a woman in Messina cannot do: the wrong done to her cousin can only be righted by a man's sword, and she has no man.
Benedick asks her one question, whether she believes in her soul that Claudio has wronged Hero, and on her word he challenges his closest friend and resigns from the prince's service. The two words turn the comedy serious, and productions have played them as a shock, a laugh or both.
Why does Claudio reject Hero at the altar?
Because he believes he saw her with a man at her window the night before the wedding, and because in Messina an injury to a man's honour is answered in public. Claudio has loved Hero since before the war, asking the prince "Can the world buy such a jewel" and, in the same breath, whether she is Leonato's heir. He lets the prince woo her for him and believes Don John's first lie, that the prince wants her for himself, in a single sentence. When Don John offers to show him Hero's disloyalty, Claudio decides before he has seen anything that if it is true he will shame her in the congregation.
What he saw was Margaret in Hero's clothes, in the dark, at a distance, answering to Hero's name. In the church he hands Hero back to her father: "Give not this rotten orange to your friend"; "She's but the sign and semblance of her honour". She denies it, faints, and is left for dead by her bridegroom, the prince and her own father. Claudio's later defence, that he sinned not but in mistaking, has been held against him ever since, and whether he deserves Hero back is the question the play leaves with the audience.
What does Don Pedro do in the play, and why does he end up alone?
Don Pedro arranges everything. He woos Hero in disguise and wins her for Claudio; he proposes, perhaps in jest, to Beatrice, "Will you have me, lady", and is turned down because a prince is too costly to wear every day; and he devises the plot to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love, announcing that "we are the only love-gods". He is gracious, generous and completely sure of his own judgement.
That judgement fails at the window. Shown what his brother wants him to see, the prince condemns Hero in church upon his honour, and once a prince's word is given it cannot be withdrawn without cost. When Borachio confesses he admits he sinned in mistaking and offers to bear any penance, but Leonato asks nothing of him. In the last scene every other principal is paired and the prince is not; Benedick tells him to get himself a wife, and the play ends with its matchmaker the one man without a match.
See Don Pedro for the full analysis.
Why is Don John the villain?
He tells us himself, and the honesty is the point. Don John is the prince's bastard brother, lately defeated in rebellion and grudgingly pardoned, and he would "I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace". He cannot flatter, cannot pretend and cannot forgive, and he calls himself "I am a plain-dealing villain" as a matter of pride. His target is Claudio, the young start-up who has the glory of his overthrow, and Hero is simply the nearest thing to Claudio that can be broken.
The plot is not even his. Borachio proposes the window trick and performs it; Don John pays a thousand ducats, leads the prince and Claudio to the orchard, and in the church says only that Hero's sins are not to be named. He flees before the truth is out and is brought back under guard in the last minute of the play. Coleridge called him the main-spring of the plot, merely shown and then withdrawn, and that is the design: so small a man does so much harm because the honourable men around him are so ready to believe him.
See Don John for the full analysis.
Why does Leonato turn on his own daughter, and then on Claudio?
Leonato believes whoever spoke last. In the church three men of rank swear Hero is unchaste, and her father, who gave her away with his fortune in Act 2, wishes her dead over her unconscious body: mine and mine I loved, and the shame is his. Within a hundred lines the friar has talked him round, and Leonato's own explanation is the play's kindest line about him: "Being that I flow in grief, The smallest twine may lead me".
By Act 5 the twine has pulled the other way. Convinced that Hero was slandered, the old governor stops the prince and Claudio in the street and challenges the young count to a duel, "Thou hast killed my child", with his brother Antonio shouting insults beside him. The scene is comic and not comic at once, and it is the first time anyone tells the two young men what they did. When Borachio confesses, Leonato sets Claudio's penance: clear Hero's name, mourn at her tomb, and marry her masked cousin in the morning. He gives his daughter away twice, and the second time Claudio has to say thank you.
See Leonato for the full analysis.
Who is Dogberry, and how does the watch solve the plot?
Dogberry is the constable of the watch, a pompous, kindly official who gets every long word wrong: "Comparisons are odorous", vigitant for vigilant, comprehend for apprehend. His charge to the watch is to avoid all trouble, let thieves steal out of their company and sleep rather than talk, and the watch, following orders on a church bench at two in the morning, overhear Borachio boasting of the whole plot and arrest him.
Then nobody will listen. Dogberry takes the news to Leonato on the wedding morning and cannot get it out before Leonato leaves for the church. The examination in the prison is a shambles until the sexton takes over, and Dogberry's great grievance is that Conrade called him an ass and the sexton was not there to write it down: "O that I had been writ down an ass". He delivers the prisoners to the prince with the charges numbered secondarily, sixth and lastly, and Borachio has to confess in plain prose that "what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light". Dogberry is paid, thanked and sent away, and never learns what he has done. Will Kemp, the company's clown, played him first; the 1600 quarto prints Kemp's name in place of Dogberry's in the examination scene.
See Dogberry for the full analysis.
Who is Margaret, and was she part of the plot against Hero?
Margaret is Hero's waiting-gentlewoman and Borachio's lover, and she is the woman at the window. On the night before the wedding she leans out of Hero's chamber in Hero's clothes while Borachio calls her Hero and she calls him Claudio, and the prince and Claudio watch from the orchard. We never see it; Borachio describes it to Conrade while the watch listen. Margaret herself is on stage the next morning teasing Hero, whose heart is heavy, that "'Twill be heavier soon by the weight of a man", and she is not among those named in the church.
The play clears her of knowing. Borachio swears she did not know what she did when she spoke to him and has always been just and virtuous, and Leonato rules that "Margaret was in some fault for this, Although against her will". She is never asked to explain herself and is given no last word; she stands masked with the other women for the second wedding. Her wit, her bawdiness and her bout with Benedick in the garden make her the liveliest of the minor figures, and she has an entry in the Supporting Cast section above rather than a page of her own.
See Hero for the full analysis of the slander and its consequences.