This piece was put together recently with the prompt of the transcript of an interview I gave at the time. I go into further detail on Much Ado in Chapter Seven: ‘Two Loves’.
I played Beatrice opposite Nicholas le Prevost’s Benedick in Greg Doran’s production of Much Ado About Nothing at the RSC in Stratford and later at the Theatre Royal Hay-market in London in 2002 when I was in my early fifties. It was therefore a tale of middle-aged love.
In a context in which unmarried women were viewed as either innocent virgins, whores or old maids, it was refreshing to play a Beatrice who is something in between. If she is a virgin, she is not innocent; and her love/hate for Benedick is a long-standing love/hate exclusively reserved for him, therefore she is no whore. Old maid she may be, but her self-professed scorn for the state of marriage and her one-off originality safeguard her from any pity. In my own life I had had experience of this fragile state and had occasionally worn a similar mask.
Beatrice is a poor relation, we sense, a long-term fixture of Leonato’s household, welcome as long as she is useful and amusing.
She may be the leading lady of the play, but in the hierarchy of the family she is the subplot and Hero plays the lead. Hero is the heiress who must be suitably married off and whose honour is prized as highly as her dowry. No one expects Beatrice to marry now, and the fact that she is not on the market frees her to be irreverent, funny and sometimes downright rude.
There is clearly a history between Beatrice and Benedick that has taken place before the play starts. It is never explicit (nor should it be made so if Shakespeare didn’t intend it), but the oblique references to it in some of Beatrice’s lines were the most delicious to play.
There are so many giveaways as to Beatrice’s love for Benedick, and the fact that the audience knows it long before she admits it herself is part of the pleasure of the play.
Benedick provides her with her first motivation to speak in the play. On learning that the soldiers have returned from war and are expected any minute, she asks,
I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?
No one said anything about Benedick. Why bring him up? She gives him a rude name (basically Sir Mountalot) to mask her serious concern as to whether Benedick is alive or dead, and hopes to get away with it.
Only Hero knows who she is talking about:
My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua,
and, quickly before anyone can mistake her inquiry for anything romantic, Beatrice races on:
He set up his bills here in Messina and challenged Cupid at the flight; and my uncle’s fool, reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid, and challenged him at the bird-bolt. I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars?
None of these quips is easily conveyed to a twenty-first-century audience, but if your onstage audience seem to find them hilarious, their laughter, the mention of Cupid, and some use of the past tense is enough to indicate that thereby hangs a tale.
So what is the history of Beatrice and Benedick? The actors and director need to cook up a theory even if the audience can never know it. We found a few possible scenarios, but the most helpful one was that at some point in the past, when they were letting their guard down and verging on a loving relationship, there had been a misunderstanding whereby each had interpreted the other as having rejected them. Both pretend to the world and to themselves that they were the dumper not the dumpee. Both are too proud to admit their pain, so they revert to raillery and public scorn.
This ‘performance’ not only acts as a much-needed shield to protect each of their egos, but it also becomes so publicly entertaining that they feel obliged to please the crowd and keep it up. Like Kate and Petruchio in what I find a less sympathetic play, The Taming of the Shrew, they are trapped by the success of their posturing into a habit of mutual dislike. Everyone expects it of them, and they have got to a point where each privately expects it of him- or herself.
Benedick probably never got so far as to consciously think he was in love with Beatrice, while Beatrice, who is a little more in touch with her feelings, deep down recognises the pain in her heart for what it is. It is more fun and more bearable to convert that pain into teasing and that love into dislike.
That is the state of play in their first meeting. This interchange could be played a little aside from the others, but Beatrice’s first line to Benedick seems aimed to publicly deflate him while he is on a roll.
I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you.
What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?
So is Beatrice:
Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?
The crowd gathers round them, and they’re off!
The speed of their repartee shows they are pitted equally against each other and hang on one another’s words. They are certainly not indifferent to one another. The actors tread the line between playful banter and downright nastiness. It is outwardly enjoyable until Benedick cuts it short rather viciously:
But keep your way, i’ God’s name; I have done.
Stranded with egg on her face, Beatrice deals him a last blow:
You always end with a jade’s trick: I know you of old.
That line was interesting to play. I could choose from night to night how thinly to disguise her anger and hurt. She could cover very successfully by shouting it after the departing Benedick with an ‘I don’t care’ laugh for those who remained on stage, or she could mutter it to herself for only the theatre audience’s ears. Beatrice skates near the edge, teases her audience both on and offstage with hints.
Another example of this comes in Act II, Scene 1, when Don Pedro says,
Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick,
and Beatrice replies:
Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it, a double heart for a single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.
She speaks in prose for most of the play. One always has to find reasons why a character speaks in prose or in verse, and it seems to me that, for Beatrice, prose lends itself to running rings round her meaning, to spontaneity and to dodging the bullet. It felt to me as though she was both wanting to be found out, and absolutely loath to be found out, at the same time. Her jokes are a brilliant mask and also a trap.
It takes the two eavesdropping scenes to reveal Beatrice and Benedick’s true feelings to themselves, and it is their private shock (and relief in a way) on discovering their love—and the way in which they ‘privately’ confess it to the audience—that is so moving and funny. It is also important for all the actors involved in those duping scenes in the garden to remember that each group thinks they are tricking each of the lovers into believing a lie that the other is in love with them, and neither group realises till much later that they have in fact revealed the truth.
Benedick blusters as he climbs down from his well-advertised position:
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
Beatrice makes her only break into verse to deliver a much humbled and uncharacteristically straightforward soliloquy. It is her only soliloquy in the play, and her only opportunity to tell the audience things she wouldn’t dream of revealing to anyone ‘inside’ the play:
What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand:
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band;
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.
It helped my humiliation that I was soaked from head to foot at the time, hair bedraggled and dress clinging to my every curve. Hero and friends, knowing that Beatrice was eavesdropping on them behind the hedge, thought it would be fun to turn the hose on it and her. (I actually longed for that moment as I was usually pretty warm by that point in the play.)
The Hero/Claudio plot takes over so quickly after Beatrice and Benedick discover their love for one another that Shakespeare denies the latter couple the happy pay-off scene, or at least he postpones it until Act V, Scene 2. Instead, they have to admit their love in the urgent and stressed circumstances of Hero’s humiliation at the wedding. Just as Beatrice is beginning to unfurl and put her trust in Benedick, she is reminded of all that she mistrusts about the male species. There is Claudio willing to believe so quickly that his betrothed has been sleeping with another man, and Hero’s own father is shockingly quick to believe hearsay above a lifetime’s knowledge of his daughter. Both men love their own honour better than they ever love Hero.
Although we know there are plenty of cultures in the world that still uphold these values, a modern Western audience finds the plot quite hard to believe at this point.
By setting the play in Sicily (1940’s: Abyssinian campaign, maybe) with visual references that brought to mind the flashbacks in The Godfather II, the director Greg Doran placed the play in a world where the dual codes of omertà and the Catholic Church set the rules for people’s lives. In this context, Claudio’s behaviour is believable and Beatrice’s bloody-mindedness is justified. It comes from a deep place of fear, however humorously expressed. In such a culture, the bonds between men are stronger than any bond between a man and a woman, and while young women will stick together in mutual protection against this fact, once they marry they are expected to switch their primary loyalty to their man and children.
Beatrice is the outsider, the transgressor against tradition. Paradoxically, it’s precisely the resistance to the yoke of marriage that binds Beatrice and Benedick together. It is what makes the relationship distinctive and very modern. They may not want to submit to marriage, but they are getting dangerously old to play the hard-to-get game.
From the moment Beatrice and Benedict admit their love to one another they are free to respect one another’s strength of character. In each of them, submitting to love was linked with an idea of loss of power, of control. But having had such a long-drawn-out and often antagonistic courtship, they can be said to really know one another and to have seen the worst of one another. This is very different from the untested and idealistic love between Claudio and Hero, who have really only fallen in love with one another’s image and social suitability. Shakespeare deliberately contrasts these two types of relationship, and each plot elucidates the other.
Hero can seem a colourless, rather wimpy character, but in the all-female scenes—the duping scene, Act III, Scene 1, and the scene before her marriage day, Act III, Scene 4—we see the real Hero, uninhibited by the presence of her father or any other man. With her women around her Hero is the alpha female, and the actress gets the chance to show the sparky girl that Beatrice loves, so different from the subdued trophy bride and favourite daughter she is forced to play in public.
By the end of Act IV, Scene 1, the love affair between Beatrice and Benedick has pretty much been resolved, but the play is far from over. The audience has grown to love Beatrice, and Beatrice loves and values Hero. This gives the rest of the play a solemnity, an urgency for lessons to be learnt, justice to be meted out and reconciliation to be earned.
In the midst of this plot unravelling, Shakespeare gives Beatrice and Benedick a lovely scene which doesn’t really have any big dramatic purpose other than to delight and satisfy the audience. The couple have still not announced their love to the onstage world, and they have a secluded scene together where they enjoy the relief of dropping the pretence, and basking in one another’s love.
It starts with Benedick alone on stage trying to compose a love-poem to Beatrice but giving up because
I was not born under a rhyming planet.
Beatrice then enters. How are they going to proceed? Immediately we get the mock crossed swords, and Beatrice needs to know whether Benedick has followed through the challenge to Claudio. Benedick answers efficiently:
Claudio undergoes my challenge; and either I must shortly hear from him, or I will subscribe him a coward.
Then he segues straight to the chase:
And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?
Then begins a scene that is extremely romantic because of its anti-romanticism. These two know one another of old but are looking at one another in a totally new light.
The banter continues, but there is a world of difference between the veiled nastiness of their earlier exchanges and these playful insults that they both know are expressions of love.
The scene is broken up by Ursula bringing them back to the immediacy of the Hero/Claudio plot, and Beatrice asks,
Will you go hear this news, signior?
Benedick comes out with the most wonderfully poetic, romantic line:
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.
Who needs a love poem after that?
Their next meeting is in the final scene. The plot is resolved. Don John has been unearthed as the perpetrator of the whole deception, and Hero has been ‘posthumously’ proven innocent. Claudio goes through a deep atonement and agrees to marry another woman that has been chosen for him—in itself a bit of a dodgy idea, but Greg worked hard to counter this and to make Claudio’s contrition, which can seem way too glib, as sincere as possible.
Everyone is assembled for the occasion when Claudio is to meet his new bride. The women enter all veiled, and Claudio must make his vows to a woman sight unseen. He declares his pledge to the veiled woman; she then lifts her veil; and hey presto she looks the image of Hero! Claudio cries out:
Another Hero!
and Hero neatly responds:
One Hero died defiled, but I do live,
And surely as I live, I am a maid.
Love, tears and reconciliation all round. But there are a few loose ends still to tie up. Benedick imitates the ritual we have just seen and asks the remaining veiled women:
Which is Beatrice?
and Beatrice steps forward.
They have a captive audience for their best act so far. Their power struggles are over. Beatrice no longer feels the need to have the last word, and together they can turn the tables on all the tricks played on them. ‘You thought we hated one another; well, surprise, surprise, we love one another.’
It is reminiscent of the final scene in The Taming of the Shrew but without that play’s problematic ambivalence. This is not a woman’s capitulation. This is set to be a marriage of equals who truly know the person they have taken on and don’t want them to change.