Much Ado About Nothing: Famous Quotes

Beatrice’s first words to Benedick, and the first shot of what the messenger has just called a merry war. He has been talking to the prince; she cuts in from the side to tell him that nobody is listening, which is untrue, since she plainly is. The insult is built to be answered, and he answers it: what, my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?

The line sets the terms for everything between them. They speak to each other only in attacks, and each attack is a way of claiming the other’s attention while denying that it is wanted. Beatrice has asked the messenger three questions about Benedick before he enters, and the play lets the audience notice what she will not. Anna Jameson, in 1832, saw in Beatrice high intellect and high animal spirits meeting and exciting each other like fire and air, and the first line has both: the intelligence to find the sharpest opening, and the spirits to take it.

Claudio’s declaration, and it is a declaration about his own eye. He has looked at Hero with a soldier’s eye before the war and liked her; now, with the war over, the liking has become something he wants a name for, and he asks Benedick to confirm it. Benedick will not: he can see without spectacles and sees no such matter. The conversation is about looking, which is what the play is about.

Two things are worth noting. Claudio asks whether Hero is Leonato’s heir before he says a word about her beauty, and he does not speak to her at all; within a hundred lines the prince has offered to woo her for him, and he has accepted. His love is sincere and it is entirely in the eye, and it is from the eye that it will be taken, at a window, by a man who knows exactly where to aim. The modern line keeps his phrase, because there is no updating it.

The prince has quoted the proverb that in time the savage bull bears the yoke, and Benedick accepts the bet: if the sensible Benedick ever bears it, pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in his forehead, paint him like a tavern sign and write under it, as they write Here is good horse to hire, that here you may see Benedick the married man. The horns are the cuckold’s, and he is offering to wear them in advance.

The speech is the creed of the play’s professed bachelor, and the play never lets him forget it. The prince quotes it back to him at the end, How dost thou, Benedick, the married man?, and Benedick, with Beatrice beside him, says that a college of wit-crackers cannot flout him out of his humour. William Hazlitt in 1817 called him a professed and staunch enemy to marriage who gives very plausible reasons for the faith that is in him; the reasons are plausible, and the faith lasts two acts.

Don John, the prince’s bastard brother, explaining himself to Conrade, who has advised him to be pleasant until he is strong enough to be otherwise. He refuses. He would rather be the wild rose in the hedge than the cultivated one in his brother’s garden; he will not put on a manner to steal anyone’s love; he is a plain-dealing villain, trusted with a muzzle and freed with a clog, and if he had his mouth he would bite.

It is the whole character in one speech, and Shakespeare gives him no more. Don John has no plan when he says it; Borachio brings him one in the next minute. What he has is a position, the brother who cannot inherit and will not pretend, and a grievance against the young start-up who took the glory of his overthrow. The muzzle and the clog are the images of a dangerous animal kept on terms, and the terms are his brother’s. The play dismisses him at the end with a promise of punishment tomorrow.

Leonato hopes to see his niece fitted with a husband, and Beatrice answers from Genesis. Men are made of earth; would it not grieve a woman to be ruled by a brave handful of dust, and to give an account of her life to a clod of wayward clay? Adam’s sons are her brothers, and she holds it a sin to marry in the family. It is a joke, it is theology, and it is a refusal.

Nobody in the first two acts says no to marriage as thoroughly as Beatrice, and nobody says it so well. The speech is also a piece of class information. Beatrice can refuse because she is an orphan with no fortune to bargain with, and her uncle laughs where a father would not; a few lines later he is telling his daughter to be ruled by him when the prince proposes. The pierce of valiant dust is the play’s best phrase for a husband, and when Beatrice takes one in Act 5 she says she does it partly to save his life.

Beatrice’s theory of marriage, delivered to Hero as advice on how to handle a proposal from the prince. Three dances: the wooing is a Scotch jig, hot and hasty; the wedding is a measure, stately and full of ancientry; and then comes repentance, which falls into a cinque pace on bad legs, faster and faster, until it sinks into the grave. Leonato tells her she apprehends passing shrewdly. She says she can see a church by daylight.

It is the sharpest thing anyone says about marriage in a play that ends with two, and it is spoken by the woman who will make the better one. The joke is in the tempo. Courtship and wedding are two dances in a known order; repentance is a third nobody rehearses, and it lasts longest. The modern verse has to unpack the pun on measure, which meant both a dance and moderation, and the play file does it by naming the three phases outright. Beatrice’s own courtship, when it comes, is conducted entirely in insults, which is perhaps her way of skipping the jig.

Benedick to the prince, after the masked ball at which Beatrice, knowing perfectly well who was behind the mask, told him that Benedick was the prince’s jester and a very dull fool. He is still smarting. Her words are daggers; if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, nothing could live near her and she would infect to the north star. He would not marry her though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed.

Nobody is this angry about someone they do not care about, and the prince, listening, draws the right conclusion: before the scene is over he has decided to bring Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection. The speech is also the play’s best description of what Beatrice’s wit does to its target. Benedick has stood, he says, like a man at a mark with a whole army shooting at him, and the picture is comic because it is exact. The poniard is a small dagger. Every word is one.

The prince has told Beatrice that she was born in a merry hour, and she corrects him: her mother cried. But then a star danced, and under that she was born. It is the loveliest thing she says in the play, and she says it a moment after refusing the prince’s own half-serious proposal, telling him he is too costly to wear every day.

The line is the play’s account of Beatrice. She is not merry by nature but by decision; the crying mother comes first and the dancing star after, and she chooses the star. Hero will shortly describe her, in the garden, as a woman whose wit values itself so highly that all matter else seems weak, and Hero is not wrong, but the star danced is the other half of the portrait. The prince’s reply is that she is a pleasant-spirited lady, and his next thought, after she has gone, is to find her a husband.

The prince’s plan, announced to Leonato, Claudio and Hero with a week to fill before the wedding. He will teach Hero how to work on her cousin; he and the two men will work on Benedick; and if the trick comes off, Cupid can retire, because they will be the only love-gods. Everyone agrees at once. Nobody asks whether Beatrice and Benedick want to be matched.

It is benign, it is generous, and it is exactly what Don John is about to do with the opposite intent: a scene staged for a hidden watcher, who believes what he overhears because of who says it. The play puts the two plots side by side and lets the audience notice that the method is the same. Gail Kern Paster, in the Folger edition, takes Beatrice and Benedick’s love as the creation of Don Pedro, undertaken to pass the time by accomplishing a difficult thing, and the prince’s own word for it is a labour of Hercules. He does the labour, and goes home without a wife.

Balthasar’s song, sung in Leonato’s orchard while Benedick hides in the arbour and the prince prepares his trap. Men were deceivers ever, one foot in sea and one on shore, constant to nothing; so sigh no more, let them go, and turn your sounds of woe into hey nonny, nonny. It is the play’s view of men, stated before Claudio proves it, and it is addressed to the women.

Benedick’s verdict is that an it had been a dog that howled thus they would have hanged him, and the prince says it is a good song. Both are right; it is a jaunty tune about betrayal. The song sits at the exact centre of the play’s cheerfulness, a lyric about faithlessness sung to set up a trick about love, and productions have often moved it to the front of the play as a kind of motto. The modern verse keeps the metre and the rhyme, which is why the first line is left exactly as Shakespeare wrote it.

Hero on her cousin, spoken for Beatrice to overhear from the bower. Nature never made a prouder heart; disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, misprising everything they look on; her wit values itself so highly that all else seems weak; she cannot love, and is so self-endeared. It is the one scene in the play in which Hero does the talking, and she talks in verse, which the play reserves for its serious moments.

The speech is a performance, part of the prince’s plot, and it is also true, which is why it works. Beatrice, hidden, hears herself described by the cousin who knows her best, and the description is not kind. Hero goes further than the plot needs, refusing to tell Beatrice of Benedick’s love because she would only mock it, and inventing a plan to slander him to her instead. Hero, obedient and quiet with the men, is sharp and inventive with the women, and the play lets the audience see it once before the church takes her voice away.

Borachio, drunk under a penthouse in the rain, telling Conrade how he earned a thousand ducats from Don John. Conrade asks whether any villainy can be so dear; Borachio corrects the question. Ask rather whether any villainy can be so rich, because when rich villains need poor ones, the poor ones can name their price. The watch are listening, and so, for the only time in the play, is the audience given the whole plot in plain words.

It is the one working man’s view of the gentry in the play, and the view is that they are dupes who pay well. Borachio goes on to a lecture on fashion as a deformed thief, which the watch take literally and spend the rest of the night pursuing, and then to the window: Margaret in Hero’s clothes, himself at the window, the prince and Claudio watching from the orchard. His confession in Act 5 completes the thought. What the wise could not discover, the shallow fools found out.

Dogberry to Verges, in front of Leonato, on the wedding morning. Verges has just said that he is as honest as any man living that is an old man and no honester than he; Dogberry rebukes the comparison as odorous, meaning odious, and tells him palabras, meaning few words. He then talks for another forty lines without mentioning the arrest.

The line is the type of all Dogberry’s errors, a word reached for and a neighbouring word grasped, and the modern verse shows the mechanism by letting him correct himself in the same breath. Odorous is also, as it happens, not wrong: comparisons do smell. The joke is that the constable is more right than he knows, and the scene makes the same point at full scale. He has the truth about Hero and cannot deliver it; Leonato calls him tedious and goes to church. Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought a drunken constable not uncommon nor hard to draw, and asked his readers to examine what goes to make up a Dogberry.

The church. The friar has asked whether Claudio comes to marry this lady; Claudio says no, and when Leonato offers her as a gift, gives her back. She is a rotten orange, the sign and semblance of her honour, and the blush that looks like a maid’s is guilt. He has chosen the wedding, with the whole of Messina present, to do it.

The orange is a precise insult. Fruit that looks sound and is rotten within is the play’s whole fear about women, that a face can be read and read wrongly, and Claudio has read Hero at a window by night and believes his eyes. Sign and semblance is the vocabulary of noting: she is only the appearance of what she seemed. Algernon Charles Swinburne, in 1880, thought the eventual marriage of Hero and Claudio a doubtfully desirable consummation, and this speech is the reason; the play forgives Claudio, and the audience is left to decide whether it should. He goes on to say farewell to her as most foul, most fair, and to lock up all the gates of love.

Hero has fainted, Beatrice thinks she is dead, and her father, instead of going to her, asks Fate not to lift its hand. Death is the fairest cover for her shame that may be wished for. His daughter has been accused by a prince, a count and a prince’s brother, and in the moment he believes them, and wishes her dead rather than disgraced.

It is the most shocking line in the play, and the play means it. Leonato goes on, when she wakes, to wish he had never had her, to call her the thing he was proud of and now cannot wash clean, and to say that if she will not confess he will tear her with his own hands. His honour is her chastity, and her shame is his loss; the speech is grief for a possession. The friar and Benedick talk him round, and by Act 5 he is challenging the men who accused her. But he said this first, and Hero heard it.

The friar’s plan, and the reasoning behind it. Let it be given out that Hero is dead. What we have we do not value while we have it; lacked and lost, we find the virtue that possession never showed us. So it will be with Claudio: when he hears she died upon his words, the idea of her life will creep sweetly into his imagination and he will mourn her, and if the slander is a lie, the lie will be found out.

It is the one piece of wisdom in the play that is also a stratagem, and it is spoken by the man who read Hero’s face in the church while the gentry read her guilt. The friar’s noting is the play’s good kind: he has watched a thousand blushes in her face, and he believes what he saw. His plan does not quite work as advertised, since Claudio shows little grief until the truth is out, but the sentence stands on its own and has been quoted ever since without the plot it was made for. The modern verse keeps it as verse, because the friar is the one voice in the scene that never loses its measure.

Alone in the church after the wedding has collapsed, Benedick has told Beatrice that he loves nothing in the world so well as her, and asked whether that is not strange. She has fenced, then half admitted it, then protested she was lying. He tells her to do it with all her heart, and she does: she loves him with so much of her heart that none is left to protest. It is the plainest sentence either of them speaks.

The two wittiest people in Messina say I love you in the plainest words in the play, and the play has spent three acts earning the plainness. Every other declaration has been in verse or in jest; this is prose, and it has a pun in it only because Beatrice cannot quite stop. Then Benedick asks what he can do for her, and she tells him. The modern line is almost unchanged, because the original is already modern English, and the one word James Anthony alters, protest to object, is the one a reader might trip on.

Benedick has just said, Come, bid me do any thing for thee. Two words answer him. It is the hinge of the play: the comedy of the merry war meets the business of the church, and the woman who has been making jokes for three acts asks the man who loves her to kill his friend. He says no, not for the wide world, and she turns to go. By the end of the scene he has agreed.

Actresses and audiences have long treated the line as the test of the part, and the laugh it sometimes gets is a measure of how well the scene has been played. Anna Jameson, in 1832, read the comedy as surviving precisely in the contrast between Beatrice’s real good nature and the fierce tenor of her language. The modern line is identical to the original. There was nothing to translate.

Beatrice’s rage, after Benedick has refused. Claudio slandered, scorned and dishonoured her cousin; he strung her along until they came to take hands and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour, destroyed her; and Beatrice would eat his heart in the market-place. Twice in the speech she wishes she were a man. The second time, she says what she would do with it.

It is the play’s most direct statement of what a woman in Messina cannot do. Beatrice has the anger, the judgement and the words, and no standing to act on any of them; she needs a man’s hand, and the only one she can command is Benedick’s. The speech ends, a few lines on, with the admission that she cannot be a man with wishing and will therefore die a woman with grieving, and it is that line, not the rage, that moves Benedick to swear by his hand that he loves her. The original breaks off with a dash before O God and the modern prose with an ellipsis: Beatrice, in both, catching her breath.

Conrade has called Dogberry an ass, and the sexton, who was writing everything down, has just left. Dogberry wants it recorded. He is a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer, and, which is more, a householder, and as pretty a piece of flesh as any in Messina; he knows the law, he is rich enough, he has had losses, he has two gowns and everything handsome about him. And he wishes, more than any of it, that he had been writ down an ass.

The greatest speech of the greatest fool in Shakespeare’s comedies, and the joke is that every item in the list is true. He is an officer, he is a householder, and he is an ass, and he knows which of the three he most wants in writing. The speech sits beside the confession that will save Hero, extracted by this man and his watch while the gentry were in church believing a lie. Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked what goes to make up a Dogberry; this is the inventory, given by Dogberry himself. The 1600 quarto prints Will Kemp’s name in place of Dogberry’s in this scene, so we know which clown first said it.

Antonio has been telling his brother to bear his grief like a man, and Leonato refuses. He will be flesh and blood. No philosopher has yet endured the toothache patiently, however they wrote in the style of gods and made a push at chance and suffering. The lines are the one place in the play where a character speaks from inside pain rather than about it.

The speech belongs to a Leonato the first four acts did not show: the fussing host and credulous father has become a man whose daughter is slandered and, as the world believes, dead, and the play gives him twenty lines of real grief before it lets him be comic again. The toothache is exact. Great sorrows get philosophy; small, intolerable, bodily ones get none, and Leonato’s point is that his is the second kind. Samuel Johnson, in 1765, noted of Leonato in the church that men overpowered with distress close with every scheme and believe every promise; here he has stopped believing anything.

Leonato has stopped the prince and Claudio in the street, and Claudio has told him to go away. The old man will not be put off. Claudio has killed his child, and if he kills Leonato too, he will at least have killed a man. Boy is the insult, and it is answered in kind: Claudio and the prince treat the challenge as a joke, and Antonio, beside his brother, calls the young lords apes, braggarts and milksops.

The scene is comic by design, two old civilians challenging soldiers, and the play lets the comedy stand while giving Leonato the lines that are not funny. He has no standing against a prince and a count except his age and his grief, and he uses both. The young men laugh about it afterwards, telling Benedick they nearly had their noses snapped off by two old men without teeth, and Benedick, who has come to challenge Claudio himself, does not laugh. Within a hundred lines Borachio is brought in and the laughing stops.

Borachio’s confession, made to the prince in the street with Dogberry and the watch standing by. He has deceived even the prince’s very eyes; what their wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light. It is the play’s verdict on itself, and it is delivered by the man who did the deceiving to the men who were deceived, in front of the fools who caught him.

The line answers the title. Much ado has been made about nothing, and the people who noted correctly were the ones nobody of rank would listen to. The prince’s reaction is to ask whether this is not poison to Claudio’s blood, and Claudio’s is to say that he has drunk it. Neither of them thanks the watch. Dogberry, a few lines later, is paid for his pains and goes home hoping God will prohibit a merry meeting. The modern line gives the sentence its full weight, as the original does, by putting the shallow fools last.

Benedick and Beatrice, courting in the garden after the church, and still fighting. He has asked which of his bad parts she first fell in love with; she has said all of them together; and he has concluded that they are too wise to woo peaceably. She answers that it does not appear in this confession, since there is not one wise man in twenty who will praise himself.

The line names what their love is going to be like, and the play agrees with it: they are the couple who talk, and talking, for them, is a kind of fighting, and the fighting is a kind of love. Benedick has just tried to write her a sonnet and failed, since he was not born under a rhyming planet, and the admission is a declaration in itself. The scene ends with Ursula bringing the news that Hero is cleared, and the lovers leave to hear it, still sparring.

The epitaph Claudio reads at Hero’s tomb by night, as the penance Leonato has set him. Done to death by slanderous tongues; death, in reward for her wrongs, gives her a fame that never dies; so the life that died with shame lives in death with glorious fame. He hangs the scroll on the tomb to praise her when he is silent, and the musicians sing a hymn to Diana, the goddess of chastity.

It is the one scene in the play without a joke in it, and Shakespeare wrote it in rhymed tetrameter so that it would sound like a ritual rather than a speech. Claudio is mourning a woman who is alive, for a death he caused with words, in words; the slanderous tongues were his and the prince’s, and the epitaph does not say so. Whether the scene is enough to earn him the second wedding is the play’s open question. The modern verse keeps the short rhymed lines, and leaves the last line of the quatrain as Shakespeare wrote it.

Hero unmasks at the second wedding, and Claudio cries another Hero. Nothing certainer, she says: one Hero died defiled, but she lives, and as surely as she lives she is a maid. It is the only moment in the play when Hero speaks for herself in public, and she speaks three lines.

The lines are a small, exact correction. Defiled is Claudio’s word, from the church; she gives it back to him attached to a Hero who is dead, and keeps the living one for herself. The friar’s plan has worked as a plot, if not as he predicted, and the play now hurries to its dance. Whether Hero has forgiven Claudio, or has been asked to, the text does not say; she is given to him by her father, as she was the first time, and says nothing more. Readers who want a Hero with a mind of her own have these three lines and her garden scene, and the play gives them nothing else.

The prince has asked how Benedick the married man is doing, and Benedick answers him. A college of wit-crackers cannot flout him out of his humour; he does not care for a satire or an epigram; since he means to marry, he will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and nobody is to mock him for what he said before, because man is a giddy thing, and that is his conclusion. He has just stopped Beatrice’s mouth with a kiss, and in a moment he will call for a dance.

It is the end of the bachelor’s creed, and the play lets him end it on his own terms, with a joke against himself that is also a defence. Giddy meant unstable as well as light-headed, and Benedick is admitting that he has turned right round without admitting he was wrong. Hazlitt’s professed and staunch enemy to marriage has become its advocate, and the play, which has mocked husbands for five acts, ends with him telling the prince to get himself a wife. The modern line keeps the shape of the sentence; its last two words are the play’s.