BENIGN AND MALIGN DECEPTIONS

Those who put on performances in Much Ado about Nothing think they know what the outcomes will be, and the transformations they seek to bring about in making Beatrice and Benedick love one another are really the bringing forth of what is already there but dormant. That is to say, the theatre audience knows that Beatrice and Benedick are in love with one another, and their aristocratic friends know it too, but they themselves are ignorant of it, thinking that they dislike one another. This is rather a subtle psychological device on Shakespeare’s part, and it is a good example of what is called dramatic irony: the audience knowing more than the charac- ters do about the world they are in. But it is more than merely irony, for as an audience we come to believe more strongly in the mutual love of Beatrice and Benedick the more that they express its oppo- site. How Shakespeare achieves this trick of making us feel that we understand characters better than they understand themselves is worth exploring for it goes to the heart of his much-discussed real- istic characterisation, which is arguably his strongest claim to genius. His characters just seem so believable that one can know them as one knows one’s friends.

Before looking at how Beatrice and Benedick are subject to benign performative deceptions, let us examine the play’s central  

malign performative deception, Don John’s trick, the fuss about nothing that gives the play its title. Before the main event of con- vincing Don Pedro and Claudio that they have seen proof of Hero’s premarital sexual infidelity, Don John warms up with a trick of con- vincing Claudio that Don Pedro wants Hero for himself. The occa- sion is a masked celebration in which the characters wear disguises and are not supposed to know with whom they are talking. Notice what a difficulty Shakespeare sets himself, for the characters have to be plausibly unsure of who is whom while the theatre audience remains able to tell them apart, lest the whole scene descend into incoherence.

The trick starts in the first scene with the agreement between Don Pedro and Claudio that at the masked celebration the former will woo Hero on the part of the latter:

[DON PEDRO]

I will assume thy part in some disguise, And tell fair Hero I am Claudio. And in her bosom I’ll unclasp my heart And take her hearing prisoner with the force And strong encounter of my amorous tale. Then after to her father will I break, And the conclusion is, she shall be thine. In practice let us put it presently. Exeunt (..–)

From the outset, this is a play in which male partners are substituted one for another and we can respond to that in at least two contrast- ing ways. One might say that men are shown to be exchangeable in the way that the marriage vows perhaps hint – ‘do you take this man?’ requires that the referent be pointed out – and that one is as good as another. However, we might think that this playful substi- tution by the men makes Hero merely a pawn that men pass between themselves as a toy, and that she is merely a conduit for the rela- tionships that the play is really concerned with, those (as the title of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book on this topic has it) Between Men ().An approach from either perspective would have to draw into its reading the fact that the comic resolution is made possible

by reversing the trick that Don Pedro and Claudio propose at the beginning: Claudio agrees to marry whoever is brought before him (‘this woman’) in the final scene.

Just which of those two responses we make as readers is not an idle matter of interpretation that we can keep separate from the play’s meanings to its first audiences, for just what Don Pedro and Claudio have in mind is almost immediately a matter of interpreta- tion within the action. Having loitered unseen in their presence, Borachio reports the scheme as though it were overt trafficking of Hero rather than a merry trick to play on her:

[BORACHIO] I . . . heard it agreed upon

that the Prince should woo Hero for himself and, having obtained her, give her to Count Claudio.

(..–)

This seems to suggest that what is being sought is Hero’s agree- ment to marry and that who is to be bridegroom is a matter that can be fixed up afterwards by the men. This is not to say, of course, that Don John is scandalised by the proposed anti-feminist abuse – he simply sees an opportunity to hurt Claudio – but the play does invite us to wonder at what point Don Pedro’s impersonation of Claudio is to be dropped. This ambiguity in the plan gives Don John the chance to work on Claudio’s insecurity and with a few Iago-like words timed to coincide with ambiguous stage action (the Prince is said to have taken Hero’s father aside) Don John can con- vince Claudio that ‘the Prince woos for himself ’ (..).

This mistaking of Claudio’s is quickly put right, and it serves two purposes in the play: it gives a foretaste of the larger mistaking that is the play’s title, and it shows Claudio to be the kind of immature dupe who is easily taken in by malicious deception. Perhaps matur - ity is not the issue, however, for when, about five years later, Shakespeare rewrote this play in a tragic register, calling it Othello, he made the dupe a middle-aged soldier. Here, Don Pedro seems to have the kind of older-brother good sense that is able to keep Claudio from serious harm, but this impression is really a trap that Shakespeare is laying for us, since in the central disaster Don Pedro is just as misled as Claudio.

In its flirtation with disaster, a comedy like Much Ado about Nothing uses exactly the devices and emotions that cause tragedies to end unhappily, such as mistaken identity, sexual jealousy, rivalry within families, and most especially revenge. Since the s espe- cially it has been unfashionable to assert that these are universals of human behaviour and criticism has attended to exceptional cases that undermine the universalist claim. After all, as the cultural rel- ativists point out, whither the sexual jealousy seen in plays such as Othello when they are read or performed in cultures that make no normative assumption of monogamy in human relations? This attention to the exceptions at the expense of the usual standards of monogamy in human relationships has caused an overstatement of the historical and cultural differences that separate the assumptions expressed by those in the plays from those that exist in the minds of modern readers and playgoers.