Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How Messina gets its couples to the altar: proxy wooing, arranged matches, matchmaking by trick, a week’s wait, the wedding that fails and the two that follow.
- Key Characters: Claudio, Hero, Don Pedro, Leonato, Beatrice, Benedick, Margaret, Antonio.
- The Core Tension: Marriage is the goal of every plot in the play and the butt of every joke against it. The play wants its weddings and cannot stop laughing at husbands.
- Key Manifestations: "Benedick the married man" (A1S1, A5S4); the proxy wooing and the betrothal (A2S1); Beatrice’s three dances (A2S1); the week’s delay and the love-gods (A2S1); the wedding morning (A3S4); the broken wedding (A4S1); the second betrothal and the dance (A5S4).
- Famous Quote:
"'Here you may see Benedick the married man.'"
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Two weddings, a dance before them, and a prince told to get a wife. The play’s happiest marriage is the one both parties swore never to make.
Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting
The play’s theory of marriage is given by the woman who refuses it. Before the ball Beatrice tells Hero how to handle a suitor, and the advice is a dance lesson.
Original
The fault will be in the music, cousin, if you be not wooed in good time: if the prince be too important, tell him there is measure in every thing and so dance out the answer.
(Beatrice, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The fault will be in his timing with the music, cousin, if you are not wooed appropriately: if the prince is too pushy, tell him there is a rhythm to everything, and romance is like a dance.
Then she sets out the three dances: wooing is a jig, hot and hasty; the wedding is a measure, stately and full of ancientry; and repentance is a cinque pace that goes faster and faster until it sinks into the grave. It is a joke with a long shadow. Beatrice has watched marriages, and she has concluded that the fun is at the front.
Hero does not answer. Her father has already told her what to say if the prince proposes, and her uncle hopes she will be ruled by him. The two cousins stand for the play’s two attitudes to courtship, the commentary and the compliance, and the theme of gender and patriarchy is in how little either can change about the dance itself.
I Have Wooed in Thy Name
Courtship in Messina is a thing done on a man’s behalf by a greater man. The prince woos Hero in a mask, speaks to her father, and hands her to Claudio at the ball with the words "fair Hero is won". Claudio wants the wedding tomorrow; Leonato wants a week.
Original
To-morrow, my lord: time goes on crutches till love have all his rites.
(Claudio, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Tomorrow, my lord: time will drag until our love has been blessed.
Original
Not till Monday, my dear son, which is hence a just seven-night; and a time too brief, too, to have all things answer my mind.
(Leonato, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Leave it until Monday, my dear future son-in-law, which is only seven days from now; and that’s even too short a time to have everything done that I’d like.
Time on crutches until love has its rites: Claudio’s impatience is a lover’s, and it is also the impatience of a man who has done no courting and has nothing to fill the interval with. Leonato’s week is for the preparations, and the prince fills it with a Herculean labour, bringing Beatrice and Benedick into a mountain of affection. The theme of deception and noting enters marriage in Messina as a way of passing the time before a wedding.
What is missing from the arrangement is the bride. Hero’s consent is a whisper in Claudio’s ear, reported by Beatrice; her dowry is announced by her father in the same breath as her hand. It is sincere on every side and it rests on nothing, and when Don John offers a reason to doubt it, there is nothing between the lovers to hold it up.
The Savage Bull
Against the arranged match stands the sworn bachelor, and the play enjoys him enormously. Benedick will trust no woman because he cannot be sure of any, and will live a bachelor so that he may go the finer. The prince has a proverb for him.
Original
Well, as time shall try: 'In time the savage bull
doth bear the yoke.'
(Don Pedro, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Well, only time will tell: ‘In time the savage bull
becomes an ox that bears a yoke to tow a cart.’
In time the savage bull bears the yoke; and Benedick answers that if ever the sensible Benedick bears it, they may pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in his forehead and paint him for a sign: "Here you may see Benedick the married man." Every joke against marriage in the first two acts is a joke about horns, and Benedick is the best at them. The last scene gives the prince and Claudio their revenge, tipping his horns with gold.
The play takes the bachelor’s side for exactly as long as it takes to marry him. His conversion, overheard in the orchard, ends with the grandest excuse a man ever found for changing his mind, that the world must be peopled, and the theme of love and romance has its best scene in the collapse of a man’s resistance to marriage, argued step by step by himself.
Our Wives' Heels
The play ends with two weddings, one of them a repair. Hero is given to Claudio a second time, masked, as her own cousin; Beatrice and Benedick deny everything and are convicted by their sonnets. Benedick, who swore he would die a bachelor, calls for the music.
Original
Come, come, we are friends: let's have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives' heels.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come on, we are friends now: let’s have a dance before we get married, to lift our own hearts and our wives’ dancing feet.
A dance before the wedding, to lighten their own hearts and their wives’ heels; and the prince, who has no wife, is told to get one, since there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn. The horn joke is the last joke in the play, and it is now made by the married man against the single one.
Whether this is a happy ending depends on which couple you watch. Beatrice and Benedick have fought their way to the altar and will go on fighting; Claudio and Hero are matched again by the same men who matched them first, and the only thing that has changed is that Claudio says thank you. The theme of honour and shame has been satisfied, the theme of status and class has put everyone back in place, and the play, which began with a joke about the bride’s mother, ends with pipers.
"Shakespeare had no mercy upon the poor cuckold, his horn is an inexhaustible subject of merriment."
— Samuel Johnson, Notes on Much Ado About Nothing, 1765
Key Quotes on Courtship and Marriage
Quote 1
Thou wast ever an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty.
(Don Pedro, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ve always been stubbornly unorthodox when faced with beauty.
Quote Analysis: Don Pedro to Benedick, who has just declared that no woman will ever make him wear horns. Heretic is the right word: Benedick’s bachelorhood is a creed, held against the orthodoxy of a world in which everyone marries, and he enjoys being burned for it. The prince’s line is affectionate and it is also a warning. Heretics in comedies are converted, and the prince has already decided to do the converting himself.
Yea, my lord; I thank it, poor fool, it keeps on the windy side of care.
(Beatrice, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Yes, my lord, and I thank it, poor silly thing, as it keeps me upwind of sorrow, out of its reach.
Quote Analysis: Beatrice to Don Pedro, who has told her she has a merry heart. She thanks it, poor fool, for keeping her on the windy side of care, upwind of sorrow where it cannot reach her. It is a joke made at the moment her cousin is being betrothed and she is not, and the merriness is doing a job. A moment later she says that everyone goes to the world but her, and she may sit in a corner and cry for a husband. The two lines are the same thought: she has chosen the windy side, and she knows what it costs.
'Twill be heavier soon by the weight of a man.
(Margaret, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’ll be heavier soon with the weight of a man on top of you.
Quote Analysis: Margaret to Hero, who has said her heart is heavy on her wedding morning. Margaret turns the heaviness into a bawdy joke about a husband, and Hero is shocked; Margaret’s defence, that marriage is honourable even in a beggar, is the play’s frankest statement of what a wedding is for. The scene is the only one in which the bride’s body is mentioned at all, and it is mentioned by a servant as a joke. An hour later it will be mentioned in church as a crime.
I had well hoped thou wouldst have denied Beatrice, that I might have cudgelled thee out of thy single life, to make thee a double-dealer...
(Claudio, Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I had rather hoped that you’d turned Beatrice down, so I might have beaten you out of living a single life to make you a liar and adulterer...
Quote Analysis: Claudio to Benedick, at the end. He had hoped Benedick would refuse Beatrice, so that he could beat him out of his single life and make a double-dealer of him, which means both a married man and an unfaithful one. It is the cuckold joke again, now made by the man who nearly killed a bride on the strength of it. Claudio has learned nothing about the joke, and the play lets him make it, because the play has never stopped making it either.
Key Takeaways
- Three Dances: Beatrice's jig, measure and cinque pace is the play's theory of marriage: hot courtship, stately wedding, and a long repentance.
- Wooed by Proxy: Hero is won by a prince on another man's behalf and given away with her father's fortune; the bride's consent is a whisper.
- The Bachelor Converted: Benedick's creed against marriage is the play's running joke, and his overheard conversion is its happiest scene.
- Two Weddings, One Earned: Beatrice and Benedick fight their way to the altar; Claudio and Hero are matched twice by the same men; the play ends on a horn joke and a dance.
Study Questions and Analysis
How are marriages made in Messina?
Between men, with the bride informed. The first news of Hero’s marriage reaches her father by a servant who overheard the prince and Claudio in the orchard, and Leonato’s response is to arrange her answer.
No, no; we will hold it as a dream till it appear itself: but I will acquaint my daughter withal, that she may be the better prepared for an answer, if peradventure this be true.
(Leonato, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
No need; we’ll just pretend it was a dream until it actually happens: but I will let my daughter know, so that she can be prepared with an answer, if perhaps this is true.
He will tell his daughter so that she can be prepared with an answer, if the report should prove true. The report is wrong about which man wants her and right about everything else: a greater man will speak to her father, and she will say what she has been told to say. At the ball Leonato gives her to Claudio "and with her my fortunes", and Beatrice has to prompt the bridegroom to speak.
Gail Kern Paster, in her "Modern Perspective" essay for the Folger edition, describes the procedure from Hero’s side: "The too-compliant Hero accepts the marriage proposal of a man in a mask and then learns to transfer her consent from the wearer of that mask, Don Pedro, to his young favorite." She also explains why nobody in the play questions it: marriage "remains the basic form of social organization, the central distribution point in Elizabethan society for the social and sexual goods of adult maturity". Harry Berger Jr. (1982) read the arrangement as the business of "the Men’s Club of Messina", in which women are the goods exchanged. The older view is that the proxy wooing is a stock romance motif, taken from Shakespeare’s sources and used mainly to set Don John’s first lie in motion, and that an Elizabethan audience would have found nothing odd in a father, a prince and a count settling a daughter’s future over her head. Both are true. The play shows the procedure working smoothly, and then shows what happens to a bride who has no voice in it. The theme of gender and patriarchy is the other name for this one.
Why does Claudio let the prince do his wooing?
Because the prince offers, because it is how great lords arrange things, and because Claudio is a young man who would rather not be seen to hurry. He says as much.
But lest my liking might too sudden seem,
I would have salved it with a longer treatise.
(Claudio, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But to avoid you thinking I am rash,
I would have said this with a longer story.
He would have salved his sudden liking with a longer story, and the prince cuts him short: what need the bridge much broader than the flood? The prince will wear a mask, speak to Hero as Claudio, and then speak to her father. Claudio accepts without a word, and the first thing he does when the wooing goes wrong, at the ball, is believe that the prince has kept her for himself.
William Hazlitt (1817) found Claudio’s confession of love "as pleasing an image of the entrance of love into a youthful bosom as can well be imagined", and did not stop to ask why the youthful bosom needed a deputy. Gail Kern Paster did: the play "takes pains to construct Claudio as inexperienced and to emphasize the superficiality of a love which arises, he says, at a moment of postcombat mental vacancy", and a man with that much experience of women would naturally let a prince do the talking. Jean E. Howard (1987) saw the proxy wooing as the first of the prince’s authorised performances, a piece of theatre that counts as kindness because a prince stages it, and that Don John can turn into a lie by describing it accurately. The arrangement tells us what kind of lover Claudio is, one for whom love and a good match are the same thing, and what kind of prince Don Pedro is, one who likes to make things happen. Neither asks Hero. The theme of status and class is in the deputising: in Messina, the higher the rank, the more one’s courtship is done by others.
Why do Beatrice and Benedick resist marriage?
For the same reason from opposite sides: each has seen what marriage does to the other sex and wants no part of it. Benedick fears horns. Beatrice’s objection is more considered, and it is about men.
He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him...
(Beatrice, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A man that has a beard is older than a youth, and a man without a beard is not exactly a man; and a man older than a youth is not for me, and a man who is not a real man, I am not for him either.
A man with a beard is more than a youth and a man without one is less than a man; the first is not for her and she is not for the second; and so she will take sixpence from the bear-keeper and lead his apes into hell. Behind the joke is the sentence about valiant dust: she will not be overmastered by a clod of marl. Benedick, for his part, will not be made a fool of by a woman, and the two refusals are mirror images.
Gail Kern Paster takes the refusals seriously: "in a misogynistic culture, resistance to marriage is rational, not idiosyncratic", and Beatrice and Benedick are the two people in the play who have noticed what the cuckold jokes are about. "For soldiers like Benedick and Othello, marriage threatens loss of a valued form of masculine singleness, a loss of control", she writes, and for a woman the loss is the plainer one, of being ruled. William Hazlitt (1817) enjoyed the resistance for its own sake, since Benedick "gives very plausible reasons for the faith that is in him", and Beatrice "is proof against everything serious". Anna Jameson (1832) quoted the play’s own verdict, that "both are too wise, too witty, and too wilful to live peaceably together", and thought it the best argument for marrying them. The play agrees with Jameson and takes Paster’s point on the way: the two who resist are the two who see clearly, and the comedy has to trick them before it can reward them. The theme of wit and communication is the form the resistance takes.
What does the broken wedding show about marriage in the play?
That its forms can be turned into weapons. The ceremony begins correctly, with Leonato asking the friar to be brief, and the friar asking the question the form requires.
If either of you know any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined, charge you, on your souls, to utter it.
(Friar Francis, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If either of you know of any untold reason why you should not be married, I command you on your life to speak it now.
Claudio turns the question on Hero, then on himself through her father, and then uses the moment set aside for impediments to make one. He gives her back as a rotten orange, calls the congregation to witness her blush, and leaves. The wedding was to be the public transfer of a daughter from one man to another, and Claudio uses the publicity to refuse delivery.
Carol Cook (1986) read the scene as the play’s masculine code reaching its logical end: the marriage ceremony is where a woman’s "legibility" is formally certified, and Claudio, believing her illegible, makes the certification into a trial, "the symbolic sacrifice of Hero". August Wilhelm Schlegel (1808) admired it as "a grand piece of theatrical effect in the true and justifiable sense" and noted how carefully it is softened "in order to prepare for a fortunate catastrophe". The Folger editors Mowat and Werstine list the three failings that let it happen, "Claudio’s own weak jealousy, Don Pedro’s touchy sense of his own honor, and Leonato’s too credulous paternal fury", and all three belong to men with a stake in the marriage as a contract. The friar, who has no stake, is the one who notes Hero’s face and proposes the remedy, another ceremony, a funeral, to make the first one possible again. Marriage in this play is repaired by the same kind of staged occasion that broke it. The theme of deception and noting runs through both.
Why is there a week between the betrothal and the wedding?
Leonato asks for it, to prepare, and the play needs it, to fill. The prince’s response to Claudio’s impatience is to promise entertainment.
Come, you shake the head at so long a breathing: but, I warrant thee, Claudio, the time shall not go dully by us.
(Don Pedro, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come on, you’re shaking your head at such a long wait: but I assure you, Claudio, this time will not be boring for us all.
The time shall not go dully by: in the interval the prince will undertake one of Hercules’ labours and bring Beatrice and Benedick into a mountain of affection. The whole second plot of the play is a way of passing the time before a wedding, and the prince says so. In the same week Don John finds the time to break the match the prince has made.
Gail Kern Paster takes the prince at his word: "I take their love as the creation of Don Pedro, who would ‘fain have it a match,’ he says, to enliven the time between Claudio’s betrothal and nuptials by accomplishing a difficult thing." Love, on this reading, is something a prince makes to amuse a house party, and the play’s happiest marriage is a diversion that took. Michael Billington, reviewing John Barton’s 1976 production for the RSC, caught the same note in its British Raj setting, "an ideal background for the play about the practical jokes of a bored officer class". Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) was more interested in why the joke works, "the vanity in each being alike", so that one trick serves two victims. The week is also the play’s measure of how fast marriages are made in Messina: betrothed at a ball, wed on Monday, with a proxy courtship in between and no conversation between the couple that we hear. Beatrice called the wooing a jig, hot and hasty. The theme of love and romance is given seven days to grow, and in Claudio’s case it does not.
Why is the matchmaker the one left without a match?
The prince proposes Benedick for Beatrice a minute after she has turned him down.
DON PEDRO: She were an excellent wife for Benedick.
LEONATO: O Lord, my lord, if they were but a week married,
they would talk themselves mad.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
DON PEDRO: She’d make an excellent wife for Benedick.
LEONATO: Oh Lord, my lord, if they were married for just a week,
they’d talk each other into madness.
Leonato thinks they would talk themselves mad in a week; the prince thinks it a labour fit for Hercules. Whether he has just been refused in earnest or in play, his answer is to give her to somebody else, and by the last scene he is the only principal on stage without a partner, told by Benedick to get himself a wife.
Gail Kern Paster reads his matchmaking as a pastime and his solitude as the natural position of a man who arranges love for others; others have heard a real proposal in "Will you have me, lady?" and a real loss in the February face he notices on Benedick and then wears himself. Anna Jameson (1832) observed that Beatrice "generally has the first word, and will have the last", and a prince is the one man with whom that could never be true, which may be reason enough for her refusal. What the text gives us is a man whose whole part in the play is to get other people married, and a play that ends on his being unmarried. Paster notes that Benedick insists on ending with a dance "in which the couples move not singly, but together, and no man is yet wearing horns", and the prince is the one man without a partner for it. Courtship in Messina is something done by the powerful for the less powerful, and the most powerful man in it has nobody to do it for him. The theme of status and class explains the loneliness better than the proposal does.
Are the two marriages at the end happy ones?
One is earned and one is granted, and the play is careful to let us see the difference. Claudio swears to marry a woman he cannot see, on Leonato’s terms.
No, that you shall not, till you take her hand
Before this friar and swear to marry her.
(Leonato, Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
No, you will not until you take her hand
Before this friar and swear to marry her.
He takes her hand and swears, she unmasks, and the only question he has ever asked her, "if you like of me", is answered with a reminder that when he loved she was his other wife. Beatrice and Benedick, by contrast, are caught by their own sonnets, yield "upon great persuasion", and are still arguing when the music starts.
A. C. Swinburne (1880) called the Claudio match "a doubtfully desirable consummation" that nonetheless "makes no flaw in the dramatic perfection of a piece which could not otherwise have been wound up at all", which is the honest formalist’s position: the comedy needs the wedding and we agree not to look too hard. Carol Cook (1986) looked hard, and found that the ending "leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated", with Hero "reappropriated to the mode of perception that killed her". Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World (2004), gave the other couple their due: "only Beatrice and Benedick, among all the couples of Shakespeare’s principal comedies, seem to hold out the possibility of a sustained intimacy". The Folger editors note that over the centuries "the Beatrice-Benedick plot has most captivated audiences and readers", and the reason is in the ending: theirs is the marriage the play shows being chosen, and Claudio’s is the one it shows being arranged twice. Hazlitt (1817) thought the whole play hit "that middle point of comedy" where "the ludicrous blends with the tender", and the last scene is where it balances. Two couples go into the dance; the theme of love and romance has a verdict on only one of them.
