Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Talk as the play’s medium and its weapon: the merry war, the puns and malapropisms, the letters and sonnets, the silence of Hero, and the gap between what is said and what is meant.
- Key Characters: Beatrice, Benedick, Dogberry, Don Pedro, Claudio, Hero, Margaret.
- The Core Tension: The characters who talk best are the ones who have to be tricked into saying what they feel; the character who cannot talk at all holds the truth that saves the play.
- Key Manifestations: The skirmish of wit (A1S1); the masked ball and "She speaks poniards" (A2S1); Benedick’s "paper bullets of the brain" (A2S3); Dogberry’s charge (A3S3); the wedding-morning puns (A3S4); the lovers’ plain words in church (A4S1); Benedick’s failed rhymes (A5S2); the sonnets (A5S4).
- Famous Quote:
"She speaks poniards, and every word stabs..."
(Act 2, Scene 1) - The Outcome: The wits marry, the talker is silenced with a kiss, the man who could not talk is paid off, and the play ends with pipers rather than words.
A Skirmish of Wit
The play’s first conversation is a contest, and Beatrice wins it against a man who does not know he is playing. The messenger reports that Benedick has done good service in the wars; Beatrice translates.
Original
You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it: he is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an excellent stomach.
(Beatrice, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Your food was mouldy, and he helped you eat it: he is a very valiant eater; he has an excellent appetite.
A valiant trencherman, a man with an excellent stomach: the soldier’s virtues become a glutton’s in two lines, and the messenger, who is only trying to be polite, says he will hold friends with her. Leonato explains to him what he has walked into, a "merry war" in which the two never meet without a skirmish. When Benedick arrives the skirmish happens on cue, and it ends with her line, "I know you of old".
Wit in Messina is a sport with rules, and the rules are that nothing said need be meant. That is its pleasure and its problem. The theme of love and romance will have to find a way past a form of talk designed to keep everyone at a distance.
My Lady Tongue
At the ball Beatrice, masked, tells a masked Benedick that Benedick is the prince’s jester, a dull fool whose only gift is slander. She knows who she is talking to. He cannot answer without unmasking, and spends the rest of the scene complaining.
Original
O God, sir, here's a dish I love not: I cannot endure my Lady Tongue.
(Benedick, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh God, sir, here’s a plate of food I hate: I cannot stand my Lady Tongue.
Lady Tongue is his name for her, and it is exact: she is the one person in the play he cannot out-talk, and the fact drives him to the far end of Asia for a toothpick rather than stay in the room. Beatrice’s own account of how her words work on him is given to the same masked face.
Original
Do, do: he'll but break a comparison or two on me; which, peradventure not marked or not laughed at, strikes him into melancholy; and then there's a partridge wing saved, for the fool will eat no supper that night.
(Beatrice, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Do that: but he’ll make a few rude puns about me, which, if nobody notices or laughs at them, will make him upset; but that means there will be an extra partridge wing available to eat, for that fool won’t eat any supper tonight because of his sadness.
He will break a comparison on her, nobody will laugh, and he will go to bed without supper. She is describing a man who lives on applause, and she is right. Wit, for both of them, is a performance for an audience, and the gulling will work because each is told that the audience has been watching something else. The theme of deception and noting is conducted entirely in words these two have taught everyone to distrust.
Comprehend All Vagrom Men
At the other end of the play’s talk is Dogberry, who uses long words the way Beatrice uses short ones, and gets every one of them wrong. His instructions to the watch are a small masterpiece of saying the opposite of what he means.
Original
You shall also make no noise in the streets; for, for the watch to babble and to talk is most tolerable and not to be endured.
(Dogberry, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Also, you shall not make any noise in the streets; because watchmen chatting and talking is quite tolerable – I mean ‘intolerable’ – and mustn’t be allowed.
Tolerable for intolerable, and a watchman who would rather sleep than talk is praised as ancient and quiet. The Shakespeare Retold version keeps each blunder and lets Dogberry correct himself in the next breath, so that a reader can hear both the word he reached for and the one he caught. The joke is not only that he gets words wrong. It is that the wrong word so often says something true: the watch are "senseless", the prisoners are full of "piety", and he himself is an "aspicious" person.
Dogberry cannot communicate at all, and he is the man holding the truth. He takes it to Leonato on the wedding morning and cannot get it out before Leonato leaves for church. The theme of status and class is in the contrast: the gentry talk beautifully and believe a lie, and the constable talks nonsense and has the facts.
So Forcible Is Thy Wit
After the church, when the two wits have admitted they love each other, their talk does not change; it changes what it is for. In the garden Benedick tells Beatrice that he has challenged Claudio and will kiss her, and she declines the kiss by logic.
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.
Foul words, foul wind, foul breath, noisome: a syllogism against kissing, and Benedick’s reply is admiration.
Original
Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ve taken the words out of context, so sharp is your wit.
She has frightened the word out of its sense, and he loves her for it. Then he asks her which of his bad parts she first fell in love with, and she asks which of her good parts he first suffered love for, and they agree that they are too wise to woo peaceably. The sparring is the love now. In the last scene their own sonnets, halting and stolen, convict them, and Benedick stops her mouth with a kiss. The theme of courtship and marriage has its wittiest couple, and it ends their talk the only way it could.
"The main pretension in ‘Much Ado’ is that Benedick and Beatrice are exquisitely witty and amusing persons. They are, of course, nothing of the sort."
— George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review, 1898
Key Quotes on Wit and Communication
Quote 1
BENEDICK: Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.
BEATRICE: A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
BENEDICK: You do repeat yourself; it’s like you’re teaching a parrot to talk.
BEATRICE: A bird who talks like me is better than a cow that talks like you.
Quote Analysis: Benedick and Beatrice, two exchanges into their first bout. He says she repeats herself like someone teaching a parrot; she says a bird with her tongue beats a beast with his. The pattern of the merry war is set in two lines: he is funnier at length, she is deadlier in short, and she gets the last word. Benedick ends the round by wishing his horse had the speed of her tongue, and she tells him he always quits before the finish. Everything they say to each other for four acts is a version of this.
I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
(Beatrice, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I was only born to tell jokes, and nothing of consequence.
Quote Analysis: Beatrice to the prince, apologising for having turned down his proposal with a joke. All mirth and no matter is her own account of herself, and it is a defence as well as a confession. If nothing she says is serious then nothing she says can be held against her, and a woman in Messina has good reason to want that. The prince will not accept it; he says she was born in a merry hour. She answers that her mother cried, and then a star danced, which is matter and mirth in one sentence.
This learned constable is too cunning to be understood...
(Don Pedro, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This intelligent constable is far too clever for me to understand him...
Quote Analysis: Don Pedro, after Dogberry has listed the prisoners’ offences secondarily, sixth and lastly, thirdly and to conclude. Too cunning to be understood is a joke at the constable’s expense, and it is also true: the prince, who has just been deceived by a sight, cannot extract the truth from a man who is trying to give it to him. Borachio has to confess in plain prose. The exchange is the play’s clearest picture of communication failing in both directions at once, the wise man unable to listen and the fool unable to speak.
'Then' is spoken; fare you well now...
(Beatrice, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You have just said ‘then’; so goodbye now.
Quote Analysis: Beatrice, when Benedick has begged her to stay "but till then". She takes the word and leaves on it: then is spoken, so she may go. It is the kind of wordplay the two of them have always used as a weapon, and now it is play. She stays, of course, to learn what passed between him and Claudio, and the scene that follows is their most affectionate. Wit in this play never stops; it changes sides.
Key Takeaways
- Wit as Armour: The merry war is a form of talk designed so that nothing said need be meant; it keeps everyone at a distance, which is its pleasure and its problem.
- The Audience Is the Point: Beatrice and Benedick perform for listeners, and the gulling works by telling each that the listeners have been watching something else.
- Nonsense Holds the Truth: Dogberry cannot say what he means and carries the facts that would save Hero; the gentry speak beautifully and believe a lie.
- Talk Changes Sides: After the church the sparring continues but becomes the lovers' tenderness; the sonnets convict them and a kiss ends the argument.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is the merry war, and why is wit the form their courtship takes?
Leonato names it in the first scene, apologising to the messenger for his niece.
You must not, sir, mistake my niece. There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her: they never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them.
(Leonato, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don’t take my niece the wrong way, sir. There is a sort of jovial conflict between Signior Benedick and her: whenever they both meet, there is a war of words between them.
A merry war, a skirmish of wit, and never a meeting without one: the uncle describes a settled habit, and Beatrice adds a history, that in their last conflict four of Benedick’s five wits went halting off. Whatever happened before the play, the quarrel is how these two talk to each other, and it is the only way either can talk to the other without risk.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, lecturing in 1808, drew the conclusion first: "the exclusive direction of their raillery against each other is in itself a proof of a growing inclination." People who fight with only one person are thinking about that person. Anna Jameson (1832) noted the balance of the war, "the power is throughout on her side, and the sympathy and interest on his", and that "Beatrice, woman-like, generally has the first word, and will have the last". Carol Cook (1986) read the war itself as the play’s subject: its language "represents the ‘merry war’ between the sexes as a masculine struggle to maintain control of representation", and Beatrice, in that reading, is fighting for a weapon that belongs to the men. The Folger editors Mowat and Werstine put the obstacle to the match in the same terms, the two are "kept apart not by a vicious outsider but by their pride in their own brilliance". Wit is the armour, and the play’s job is to get it off them without their noticing. The theme of love and romance in this play is reached by way of a quarrel, and the quarrel never quite stops.
Are Beatrice and Benedick actually witty?
The question has been argued since there were critics, and the play half invites it, since the pair are forever being told how witty they are. Benedick’s long complaint about Beatrice after the ball is a fair sample of his manner.
I would not marry her, though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed...
(Benedick, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I wouldn’t marry her, even if she’d been given all the paradise that Adam and Eve owned before Adam sinned.
All that Adam had before he fell; Hercules turning the spit; the infernal Ate in good apparel: it is a torrent of comparisons, and whether it is wit or merely fluency depends on the listener. Beatrice’s best lines are shorter and sharper, and she wins most of their exchanges by stopping first.
George Bernard Shaw, reviewing a production in 1898, was unsparing: "The main pretension in ‘Much Ado’ is that Benedick and Beatrice are exquisitely witty and amusing persons. They are, of course, nothing of the sort." Benedick’s pleasantries "might pass at a sing-song in a public-house parlor", and what saves the part is "nothing but the music of the words — above all, not their meaning". William Hazlitt (1817) took the opposite view: the two "are both essences in their kind". Anna Jameson (1832) split the difference, admitting that their exchanges "contain more mirth than matter" while insisting that "Beatrice more charms and dazzles us by what she is than by what she says", and noting that "the wit of Beatrice is less good-humored than that of Benedick; or, from the difference of sex, appears so". The historical record sides with Hazlitt on popularity: Leonard Digges, in verses printed in 1640, wrote that "let but Beatrice / And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice / The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes, all are full", and Charles I wrote "Bennedik & Betrice" against the title in his Second Folio. Marjorie Garber, in Shakespeare After All (2004), observed that the pair "anticipate the glib and genteel barbs of the disillusioned pairs who populate stage and screen", which is to say that whether or not they are witty, everyone witty since has copied them. The theme of gender and patriarchy is in Jameson’s aside: the same joke sounds harsher from a woman.
What do Dogberry’s malapropisms say about language in the play?
That words and meanings come apart easily, and that the gap can be funny or fatal depending on who is standing in it. Dogberry’s examination of the prisoners begins with a question about religion and a note for the record.
Write down, that they hope they serve God: and write God first; for God defend but God should go before such villains!
(Dogberry, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Write down that ‘they hope they serve God’; and write ‘God’ first; for in God’s name, God should be written before the names of these villains! Gents, it’s already proven...
Write God first, for God defend but God should go before such villains: the sentence means to be pious and ends up proposing that God be put at the top of a list of knaves. Every official word in Dogberry’s mouth comes out bent, "comprehend" for apprehend, "redemption" for damnation, "odorous" for odious, and the audience laughs because the sense survives the words. The Shakespeare Retold version supplies the right word beside the wrong one in Dogberry’s own voice, which is the fairest way to hear him.
William Hazlitt (1817) called Dogberry and Verges "inimitable specimens of quaint blundering and misprisions of meaning", and heard in them a satire on "that formal gravity of pretension and total want of common understanding" which had, he thought, risen since to the highest offices in the state. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) refused to treat him as a mere clown: "Take Dogberry: are no important truths there conveyed, no admirable lessons taught, and no valuable allusions made to reigning follies, which the poet saw must for ever reign?" His table-talk recorded the point more briefly, that Shakespeare "could make folly a vehicle for wit, as in Dogberry". George Bernard Shaw (1898) gave the actor’s rule, that "Dogberry’s first qualification must be a complete unconsciousness of himself as he appeals to others", and was furious that Irving had cut the part. What the malapropisms do for the play is set a limit. Everyone else in Messina controls their words and is deceived; Dogberry controls nothing and is right. The theme of status and class is in the joke: the man at the bottom is the only one whose words cannot lie, because they cannot mean.
What does Hero’s silence communicate?
Obedience, and the limit of what a woman in Messina is allowed to say. Her part in her own betrothal is a whisper, reported by someone else.
My cousin tells him in his ear that he is in her heart.
(Beatrice, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My cousin Hero is whispering in Claudio’s ear that she loves him.
We learn that Hero loves Claudio from Beatrice, who heard it said in his ear. Hero has one line in the first scene, flirts for a few lines with a masked prince, and speaks freely only among women in the orchard. In the church she manages a question and a denial, and the denial is heard as proof. Her silence is not a failure to communicate. It is the message, and the men read it as they please.
Carol Cook (1986) made this the centre of her reading: in Messina "to read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated", and Hero’s quietness is the condition of being read. "Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty", Claudio decides, and the same blush, "noted" by the friar, means innocence; the sign is silent and the men supply the meaning. Jean E. Howard (1987) pointed out that Hero has lines in neither of the scenes that decide her fate, the window and the church, and that the play’s theatre is written by men for men to watch. William Hazlitt (1817) heard the silence differently and found in her few words "the most affecting simplicity", which is how the nineteenth century preferred its heroines. The play lets Hero be quick and funny where the rules are suspended, with Margaret, with Ursula, with a man in a mask. Where they are in force she says "I do" and "None, my lord". The theme of gender and patriarchy is what her silence is about; this theme is how it works.
What is the role of letters and writing in the play?
Writing is the one form of communication in Messina that cannot be overheard, and so it is where the truth hides. The gulling of Benedick turns on a letter Beatrice is said to have written and torn up.
O, she tore the letter into a thousand halfpence; railed at herself, that she should be so immodest to write to one that she knew would flout her...
(Leonato, Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, Beatrice tore that letter into a thousand pieces; she was furious with herself for being so forward as to write to someone she knew would mock her...
The letter is an invention, part of the trick, and Benedick believes in it because it is the kind of thing a proud woman would do. In the last act the invention comes true. Claudio produces a halting sonnet in Benedick’s hand; Hero produces one stolen from Beatrice’s pocket; and the two lovers, who have just denied everything aloud, are convicted by their own writing. The sexton’s written examination does the same for Hero: the plot is undone on paper.
Alexander Leggatt, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974), described the play’s method as finding "the idea of human reality at the heart of convention", and the sonnets are the case: the two lovers who refuse the conventional language of love turn out to have tried it, badly, in private. Frank Kermode, in Shakespeare’s Language (2000), observed that this is a play "in which great energy has gone into prose", and the one attempt at verse by its prose lovers is their undoing. Benedick had already confessed the problem in the garden, that he could find no rhyme to lady but baby, and was not born under a rhyming planet. The joke is kind. Speech in this play is always performed for someone; writing is done alone, and so it is the only place these two tell the truth. The theme of deception and noting is beaten, in the end, by evidence that nobody staged.
How does the play mark the change in Benedick through language?
By having his friends notice before he does. In the orchard Benedick mocked Claudio for having turned "orthography", a man of fantastical words; one scene later the prince and Claudio catalogue the signs in Benedick: the shaved beard, the civet, the washed face, and the one that matters.
Nay, but his jesting spirit; which is now crept into a lute-string and now governed by stops.
(Claudio, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And no, but his joking mood has transformed into a string from a love-song playing lute, controlled by pressing frets.
His jesting spirit has crept into a lute-string and is now governed by stops, the frets a player presses: the free wit has become a melancholy instrument. Benedick’s own contribution to the scene is "I have the toothache", which is the shortest thing he says in the play, and the prince and Claudio enjoy themselves at length. The man who could not stop talking has nothing to say.
William Hazlitt (1817) admired the design: Benedick’s "character as a woman-hater is admirably supported, and his conversion to matrimony is no less happily effected", and the conversion is audible before it is confessed. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1808) had a rule for it, that "the lovers of jesting must fix a point beyond which they are not to indulge in their humour, if they would not be mistaken for buffoons by trade", and the toothache scene is where Benedick finds the point. George Bernard Shaw (1898), who thought Benedick "not a wit, but a blackguard", would have said the change was for the better. By the church Benedick is saying the plainest things in the play, "I do love nothing in the world so well as you", and by the garden he is admiring Beatrice’s wit rather than competing with it. The last speech is the old fluency back, but turned: a college of wit-crackers cannot flout him out of his humour, and man is a giddy thing. The theme of love and romance in this play is measured in what it does to a man’s talk.
How does the play use prose and verse?
Mostly prose, which is unusual for Shakespeare, and the shifts into verse are where the play tells us to listen differently. The wits talk in prose; the lovers of the other plot talk in verse when they are being formal. The first verse in the play comes when Claudio is alone with the prince and confesses his love, and the orchard scene turns to verse the moment the music is called for.
How still the evening is,
As hushed on purpose to grace harmony!
(Claudio, Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This evening is so calm,
As if it hushed itself to grace the music!
Claudio, who has been plotting in prose, hears the evening go quiet and speaks a couplet. Then the song, and then back to prose for the trick. The church is in verse, because it is a ceremony; the garden afterwards is in prose, because it is Beatrice and Benedick. Dogberry never leaves prose, and never could.
Frank Kermode, in Shakespeare’s Language (2000), saw this as the play’s distinction: a work "in which great energy has gone into prose", and one that, "of all Shakespeare’s comedies", "best prefigures the comedies of the Restoration". The Folger editors Mowat and Werstine make the same point about influence, that "it is generally agreed that Beatrice and Benedick are the model for the witty lovers in comic drama of later centuries", and those lovers talk in prose. Hazlitt (1817), who loved the play, nonetheless thought that "the serious part is still the most prominent here", and the serious part is where the verse is: Claudio’s confession, the friar’s plan, Leonato’s grief, the tomb. The two registers are two kinds of honesty. Verse is what people speak when they mean to be believed, and the play shows verse believing a lie; prose is what Beatrice and Benedick speak when they mean nothing, and the play shows prose arriving at the truth. The theme of honour and shame lives in the verse. The theme of wit lives in the prose, and wins.
