Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: Leonato’s garden, on the day of the challenge.
- What Happens: Benedick asks Margaret to fetch Beatrice, fails to write a love poem, and courts Beatrice in their usual fashion while confirming that he has challenged Claudio. Ursula brings news that Hero is cleared and Don John has fled.
- Key Characters: Benedick, Margaret, Beatrice, Ursula.
- Dramatic Function: A breathing space between the street and the tomb: it shows the lovers together after the church, keeps the challenge alive, and delivers the news that resolves the plot while the audience watches two people fail to be romantic.
- Famous Quote:
"Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably."
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2) - Why It Matters: The scene is the play’s answer to what Beatrice and Benedick are like in love: exactly as they were before, and the honesty of that is its charm.
Scene Summary
Benedick meets Margaret in the garden and asks her to help him to a word with Beatrice. Margaret bargains for a sonnet in praise of her beauty, takes his promise that no man living shall come over it in a bawdy sense, and the two fence for a few lines about wit, swords and bucklers before she goes to fetch her mistress. Alone, Benedick tries to sing a love song and gives up: Leander, Troilus and the whole bookful of old lovers were never so turned over in love as he is, but he cannot show it in rhyme, having tried and found only baby for lady, horn for scorn and fool for school. He was not born under a rhyming planet.
Beatrice arrives and the two of them spar at once. She came when he called and will go when he bids; he asks her to stay till then; she wants to know what has passed between him and Claudio. Only foul words, he says, and offers a kiss, which she refuses with a chain of logic running from foul words to foul breath. He tells her plainly that Claudio has received his challenge and must answer it or be called a coward, then asks which of his bad parts she first fell in love with; she says all of them together, and asks which of her good parts made him suffer love. He loves her against his will, he says, and she says she will spite her heart for his sake. He concludes that they are too wise to woo peaceably, and she points out that no wise man praises himself, which sends him into a speech about the need, in these days, to be the trumpet of one’s own virtues. He asks after Hero, who is very ill, and after Beatrice, who is very ill too, and tells her to serve God, love him and mend.
Ursula hurries in with news from the house: it is proved that Hero was falsely accused, the prince and Claudio mightily abused, and Don John, the author of it all, has fled. Beatrice asks Benedick whether he will come and hear it; he answers that he will live in her heart, die in her lap and be buried in her eyes, and go with her to her uncle’s.
Not Born Under a Rhyming Planet
The scene opens with Benedick trying to be a lover by the book and failing at every page. He needs a go-between, so he flatters Margaret; he needs a song, so he sings four lines and stops; he needs a sonnet, so he lists the rhymes he cannot use.
Original
I mean in singing; but in loving, Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole bookful of these quondam carpet-mongers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse, why, they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love. Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried: I can find out no rhyme to 'lady' but 'baby,' an innocent rhyme; for 'scorn,' 'horn,' a hard rhyme; for, 'school,' 'fool,' a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings: no, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I mean my singing deserves pity; but in love, that Leander who swam to his lover, Troilus who first used a go-between, and a whole bookful of old-time carpet knights and ladies’ men, whose names have a lyrical quality that sounds great in unrhyming verse, why, none of them were so truly made to suffer in love as I have been. Indeed, I cannot express it in a rhyming poem; I’ve tried. I can find nothing to rhyme with ‘lady’ except for ‘baby’, which is an immature rhyme; for ‘scorn’, ‘horn’, which is inappropriate; for ‘school’, ‘fool’, which is a childish rhyme; these are all ominous endings for a poem. No, I was not born a rhyming poet, nor can I woo a lady with flowery language.
It is one of the play’s best comic set pieces and one of its most revealing. Leander, Troilus, the carpet-mongers whose names run smoothly in blank verse: Benedick measures himself against the literary lovers and finds that his suffering is greater and his verse is worse. The rhymes he rejects are a small self-portrait. Lady and baby is innocent, scorn and horn is hard, since horn means cuckold, and school and fool is babbling; he cannot write the conventional poem because every rhyme the convention offers turns into a joke against himself. The theme of wit and communication is at its most affectionate here. The man who could talk Beatrice to a standstill cannot talk to her the way the sonnets say he should, and the scene is kind to him about it. The audience, which will see him convicted by a halting sonnet in the last scene, knows that he tried.
Foul Words Is but Foul Wind
Beatrice arrives and the courtship resumes in the only form either of them knows. He offers a kiss; she turns it into a syllogism; he asks which of his bad parts she fell for; she says all of them. Nothing has changed since Act 1 except that both of them now mean the opposite of what they say.
Original
Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.
(Beatrice, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Angry words are just smelly wind, and smelly wind is only bad breath, and bad breath stinks; and so I will leave without kissing you.
The exchange is the scene’s centre and the play’s demonstration of its own thesis: the merry war was always a courtship, and the courtship, once admitted, is still a war. Beatrice’s refusal of the kiss is wit used as armour exactly as it was at the ball, and Benedick’s reply, that she has frighted the word out of his right sense, is a compliment to the weapon. Then he tells her plainly about the challenge, and the plainness is new. Between the two jokes sits the one thing in the scene that is not a joke: Claudio undergoes my challenge, and Benedick will call him a coward if he does not answer. The theme of love and romance in this play is love that has to be caught rather than declared, and the scene catches them twice, once in his admission that he loves her against his will and once in her promise to spite her own heart for his sake. Too wise to woo peaceably is his verdict, and it is the truest line either of them speaks about the two of them.
Yonder’s Old Coil at Home
The scene ends with the plot arriving by messenger. Ursula’s speech does in five lines what the previous scene took three hundred to do, and the lovers receive it in character: Beatrice asks whether he will come, and Benedick answers with a conceit.
Original
I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes; and moreover I will go with thee to thy uncle's.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I will live in your heart, die in your lap, and be buried in your eyes; and, what is more, I will come with you to your uncle’s.
The news is delivered to the two people in the play who most needed it and least expected to hear it this way. Beatrice demanded Claudio’s death in the church; now Hero is cleared without a blow, Don John has fled, and the challenge Benedick has just confirmed is suddenly beside the point. Neither of them says so. Benedick’s reply is a lover’s triple conceit, the heart, the lap and the eyes, with a bawdy sense in the middle, and then the plain promise to go with her, which is what she asked. The theme of deception and noting is resolved offstage and reported here, and the play chooses to let the lovers hear it in the garden where Benedick was gulled, so that the place where the trick was played is the place where the truth arrives. The scene has been a holiday from the plot, and the plot comes to collect them.
Language and Technique
- Failed rhyme: Benedick lists the rhymes he cannot use, lady and baby, scorn and horn, school and fool, and each is a joke against the lover who tries it. The device shows a man failing at the conventional love poem and being funnier than the poem would have been.
- Chain argument: Foul words are foul wind, foul wind is foul breath, foul breath is noisome, therefore no kiss: Beatrice refuses him by a chain of logic, each link absurd and the conclusion sound. It is wit as armour, the play’s recurring device.
- Bawdy: No man shall come over it, below stairs, swords and bucklers, pikes screwed in with a vice: Margaret and Benedick’s opening exchange runs on sexual double meaning, which the modern text makes plain.
- Classical lovers: Leander, who swam the Hellespont for Hero, and Troilus, who used Pandarus as a go-between, are the lovers Benedick measures himself against; the first drowned and the second was betrayed, which is his point.
- Prose throughout: The scene is entirely in prose, including the lovers’ declarations. Verse is for ceremony in this play; Beatrice and Benedick are never allowed it when they are alone together, and the prose is their intimacy.
Key Quotes from Act 5, Scene 2
Quote 1
To have no man come over me! Why, shall I always keep below stairs?
(Margaret, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To have no man climb on top of me! So, shall I always stay in the servants’ quarters downstairs?
Quote Analysis: Margaret takes Benedick’s promise, that no man living shall come over his sonnet, in its bawdy sense, and turns it into a question about rank: shall she always stay in the servants’ quarters, below stairs, with no man coming up to her? It is the play’s one joke about class made by someone at the bottom of it. The modern verse keeps both senses. Margaret can out-talk a gentleman and will still go and fetch Beatrice when told, and the exchange shows she knows it.
Suffer love! A good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Suffer love! That’s a good description! I do suffer in love indeed, for I love you against my will.
Quote Analysis: Benedick seizes on Beatrice’s word, suffer, and admits what the gulling scene made him admit to himself: he loves her against his will. It is the plainest declaration he makes before the last scene, and it is framed as a complaint. The modern verse keeps against my will. Beatrice’s answer, that she will spite her own heart for his sake, is the same admission in the same key, and the two of them are, for a moment, saying the same thing.
Madam, you must come to your uncle. Yonder's old coil at home: it is proved my Lady Hero hath been falsely accused, the prince and Claudio mightily abused; and Don John is the author of all, who is fled and gone. Will you come presently?
(Ursula, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Madam, you must go to your uncle’s house. There’s much commotion at the house: it’s been proved that Lady Hero was falsely accused, and that the prince and Claudio have been deceived; and Don John is the mastermind of it all, but he has fled and left. Will you come right away?
Quote Analysis: Ursula’s news, in five lines: Hero cleared, the prince and Claudio abused, Don John fled. The plot of the play is resolved in a servant’s message delivered in a garden, and the two people who hear it have spent the scene talking about rhymes and kisses. The modern verse keeps the haste. The placing is deliberate: the audience watched the truth come out in the street, and the lovers get it second-hand, which is how most news arrives in Messina.
Key Takeaways
- A lover without a poem: Benedick tries a song and a sonnet and fails at both; the scene is kind to the failure, and the halting sonnet he does write will convict him in Act 5, Scene 4.
- The war goes on: Beatrice refuses a kiss by syllogism and asks which of his bad parts she fell for; love has changed what they mean, not how they talk.
- The challenge stands: Between the jokes, Benedick confirms that Claudio has received his challenge and must answer or be called a coward.
- The plot arrives by messenger: Ursula’s five lines resolve the main plot offstage, and the lovers go to hear the rest, Benedick promising to live in her heart and die in her lap.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why can’t Benedick write Beatrice a love poem?
Because every rhyme the convention gives him turns into a joke, and he knows it. Lady rhymes with baby, which is innocent; scorn with horn, which is hard, horn being the cuckold’s badge; school with fool, which babbles; and he concludes that he was not born under a rhyming planet and cannot woo in festival terms. The speech sets Benedick against the literary lovers, Leander who swam the Hellespont and Troilus who employed the first pander, and finds that he suffers more than any of them and writes worse. It is a confession of sincerity disguised as a confession of incompetence.
The god of love,
That sits above,
And knows me, and knows me,
How pitiful I deserve...
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
‘The god of love
That sits above,
And knows me, and knows me,
I deserve so much pity…’
The failure is the point of the character. George Bernard Shaw (1898) argued that Benedick’s wit was ordinary and that the charm of the part lay in the music of the words; this speech is the one place the play agrees with him, since the music is exactly what Benedick cannot produce. William Hazlitt (1817) admired the way the professed woman-hater’s conversion is handled, and the attempted song is the conversion’s comic cost: a man who mocked Claudio for turning orthography now cannot turn a couplet. In the last scene Claudio will produce a halting sonnet of Benedick’s own pure brain, so the attempt went on after the audience stopped watching. The theme of wit and communication includes its own failures, and this is the most likeable of them.
How has the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick changed since the church scene?
In substance, completely; in manner, not at all. In Act 4, Scene 1 they declared their love and Beatrice set him a task; here he has done it, Claudio undergoes his challenge, and the two of them meet as lovers who have admitted it. What they do with the admission is fence. She refuses his kiss, he asks which of his bad parts she loved first, she asks which of her good parts made him suffer, and the one thing both can say plainly is that they love against their own inclination. Benedick’s line that they are too wise to woo peaceably is the scene’s summary and the play’s.
In spite of your heart, I think; alas, poor heart! If you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates.
(Beatrice, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You love me in spite of your heart, I think; oh dear, poor heart! If you spite your heart for my sake, I will spite my heart for your sake; for I can’t ever love someone my friend hates.
August Wilhelm Schlegel (1808) warned that lovers of jesting must fix a point beyond which they do not indulge their humour, or be taken for buffoons by trade, and the scene is where Shakespeare shows the point being fixed: between the jokes, Benedick tells her plainly about the challenge, and Beatrice asks plainly how he stands with Claudio. Anna Jameson (1832) found in Beatrice “high intellect and high animal spirits” meeting like fire and air, and the spirits have not been dampened by love; what has changed is that the fire now has somewhere to go. The theme of love and romance in this play is love admitted under protest, and the protest here is the pleasure.
What is the significance of Margaret’s exchange with Benedick?
It gives Margaret, who performed the window trick in Hero’s clothes and has not been seen since the church, a scene of her own, and it shows her wit to be as quick as her mistress’s cousin’s. Benedick promises her a sonnet so high that no man shall come over it; she takes come over bawdily and asks whether she must always keep below stairs, in the servants’ quarters. The fencing that follows, greyhounds’ mouths, blunt foils, swords and bucklers, pikes screwed in with a vice, is sexual all the way down, and Margaret gives as good as she gets before going to fetch Beatrice.
The exchange matters because of what the audience knows and Margaret does not. She has not yet been told that her night at the window nearly killed Hero; in the last scene Leonato will say she was in some fault, though against her will, and the play will leave it there. Here she is simply a clever gentlewoman flirting with a gentleman who needs a favour, and the lightness is pointed. Gail Kern Paster, in the Folger edition, notes how little the play asks of Margaret, who allows herself to be courted as Hero in Hero’s clothes and is never made to explain. The scene lets her be witty instead of guilty, and the theme of status and class gets its one joke from below stairs.
Why does the news of Hero’s vindication arrive in this scene, and why by messenger?
Because the audience has already seen the truth come out, in the street in Act 5, Scene 1, where Borachio confessed before the prince and Claudio; the lovers were not there, and the play has to bring them the news. It chooses to do it with Ursula, in five lines of prose, at the end of a scene that has been entirely about rhymes and kisses. The effect is of the plot interrupting a holiday. Benedick has just confirmed his challenge and Beatrice has just asked after her very ill cousin, and then a servant runs in to say that Hero is cleared, the prince and Claudio abused, and Don John fled.
Shakespeare often resolves his plots offstage and reports them, and the choice here is kind to the lovers. Beatrice demanded Claudio’s death; she is spared having to withdraw the demand, because the challenge becomes moot before anyone has to mention it. Benedick’s reply to her question, whether he will come and hear the news, is a lover’s conceit followed by a plain yes, and that order, joke then promise, is the scene in miniature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) thought the interest of this play lay always in the characters rather than the plot, and the scene proves him right by treating the plot’s resolution as something to be heard about on the way to the house. The theme of deception and noting ends here for the lovers, in a garden, second-hand.
Is this scene necessary, or could the play go straight from the street to the tomb?
It could, as far as the plot goes; nothing happens here that the last two scenes need. What the scene supplies is tone. Act 5, Scene 1 ends with Borachio’s confession and Claudio’s penance, and Act 5, Scene 3 is the penance performed at the tomb; without this scene the audience would go from the street to the grave without a laugh, and the play would lose its balance. Shakespeare puts the lovers in the garden, in prose, failing to write poems and refusing kisses, so that the comedy is heard again before the ritual.
Serve God, love me and mend. There will I leave you too, for here comes one in haste.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Serve God, love me and you’ll soon feel better. I’ll leave that with you, because someone is hurrying over here.
The scene also settles something about the lovers that the church scene could not. In Act 4 they declared themselves in the wreckage of a wedding, under pressure, with a death demanded; here they are shown with the pressure off, and they are the same two people. William Hazlitt (1817) praised the play for hitting the middle point of comedy where the ludicrous blends with the tender, and this scene is where the blend is most relaxed. Benedick’s parting advice, serve God, love me and mend, is a joke and a proposal and a prescription at once. The theme of courtship and marriage is conducted here in its truest register for these two, which is prose, in a garden, interrupted.
