Desiring H: Much Ado About Nothing and the sound of women’s desire
Late in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice and Margaret pun about the orthography of women’s desire. This, perhaps, is not all that surprising in a play that mocks the language of love, especially its ornate conventions. Out of tune with her friends, and confessing that she is feeling ill, Beatrice interrupts Margaret and Hero in order to remind her cousin that it is time to leave for her wedding to Claudio: ‘’Tis almost five o’clock, cousin; ’tis time you were ready. By my troth, I am exceedingly ill. Hey-ho!’ (3.4.47–8) Her cryptic exclamation ‘hey-ho!’ confounds contextual meaning, which Margaret quickly realizes. Recalling the festivities earlier that week, especially Beatrice’s quoting of ‘Hey-ho for a Husband’, a ballad about single women’s longing, Margaret queries: hey-ho ‘[f]or a hawk, a horse, or a husband’ (3.4.49)? Expanding on both the song’s syntax of desire and Margaret’s clever rejoinder, Beatrice replies that hers is a desire ‘[f]or the letter that begins them all, H’ (3.4.50).
Beatrice and Margaret’s staccato exchange moves quickly through a host of allusions that draw on diverse sources and seem to require critical explication. Their puns about songs such as ‘light of love’ and ‘Hey-ho for a husband’ lead to puns about dancing and being ‘light’ in the heels, which leads to jokes about dancing and kicking, then animals and breeding, then sexual desire, its aches and itches, and finally circles back to puns about women’s honour, all while Hero dresses for her wedding to Claudio. The dramatic irony is overwhelming, the breathy sound of the women’s excessive Hs in this scene emphasizing what’s about to be lost in the next: honour.
H, the eighth letter of the Roman alphabet, seventh in the Greek, signals a host of meanings, a point that Beatrice cleverly uses to trump Margaret’s excessive puns.1 A majuscule that embodies perfect symmetry, its graphic form mirroring itself, Beatrice’s desire for the letter H is curious, marking while also obfuscating any precise meaning. When read silently on the page, her pun, like the letter, doubles back on itself, producing a need for critical explication.
Glossed as an aural pun, editors explain Beatrice’s desire for H as a trick of early modern pronunciation.2 When said aloud, H rhymed either with bodily ‘aches’ or ‘itches’ and was thus a homonym of pleasure and pain. As a pun, it focuses not on the object of desire but on its bodily effects, a clever point in this scene that discusses both. But it is one that appears often in early modern literature, fourteen other times in Shakespeare’s works, with comic (The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors) as well as somber effects (Hamlet, The Rape of Lucrece). Consider, for example, Scarus’s pun late in Antony and Cleopatra: wounded on his arm, ‘bleeding apace’, he quips that his wound was ‘like a T, / But now ‘tis made an H’. The line (both the actor’s and the one on his body to which it alludes) draws attention to the physicality of the letter itself, the character’s wounds and the actor’s body. To make a T an H involves turning it on its side and adding an additional stroke, which may be what happens as Scarus moves and his wound bleeds. But Scarus also puns on the sound of ‘H’, noting that only now does the ‘T’ start to ‘ache’. Scarus’s pun, like Beatrice’s, offers H as a cryptic sign of embodied histories, ones both hidden and marked.
In this play, where love is described as a ‘turn’ to ‘orthography’, Beatrice’s curious desire for H reorients the lexical crux at the heart of the play, pointing towards arcane allusions and marginal characters. Beatrice is, as Ursula quips earlier in the play, capable of ‘spelling men backwards’, a description that suggests not only witchcraft but also Hebrew and Arabic textual traditions. In love, Beatrice ‘turns Turk’, converting to a new spatial and social realm, but one in which the co-ordinates of desire are much more complicated. Her H goes both ways.
In this way, Beatrice’s desire for H matches my own, signalling a commitment to both the rigour of material history in the past as well as the pleasure in refusing to spell out certain meanings. That Beatrice dwells on this sound matters, I think, particularly if we think of it as part of a much longer history of women’s desire, one whose textual trace is less legible in the historical record that has come to define queer historiography.3 That we cannot know for certain what Beatrice’s H sounded like, whether it denoted pleasure or pain, marks it as the kind of literary citation I’ve come to love, a textual cipher, an ephemeral trace, a juncture of fiction and material history, one that cannot possibly bear the weight of meaning placed upon it, but still beckons for it.
Following both Joel Fineman and Bruce Smith’s influential work on the sound of ‘O’ in early modern drama, Miriam Jacobson’s novel work on the links between zero, ciphers and ‘o’ in early modern poetry, and Jeffrey Masten’s paradigm-shifting work on the letter ‘Q’ in early modern literature, I explore Beatrice’s desire for H as both a sound and a letter in this essay. In doing so, I connect it to the textual and theatrical mystery of Margaret’s role in the play. Margaret, I argue, explicates, aspirates and frustrates Beatrice’s desire for H, providing a complicated model for me on thinking through what can and cannot be spelled out in our histories of sexuality.4 My goal is thus in line with Masten’s call for a queer philology, one that attends to the nuances and arcane particularities of an early modern lexicon of desire. As Masten argues, ‘[t]here can be no nuanced cultural history of early modern sex and gender without spelling out its terms—for what alternatives do we have?’5
Masten’s meticulous and inspiring argument demonstrates how a literary love of letters might animate aspects of the history of sexuality that remain barely legible in the textual record. Yet some aspects of this history remain occluded. The problem is summarized succinctly by Valerie Traub: if, as Masten argues, ‘the study of sex and gender in historically distant cultures is necessarily a philological investigation’, then, as Traub asks, ‘what might happen when terms refuse to be spelled out?’6
The arcane ‘historical particularities’ of early modern orthography offer a useful way to start; indeed Masten begins his book by reading early modern orthological anxiety about the majuscule letter Q, whose tail (at least in print) exceeds the square space allotted to it. Q, according to early modern orthographers, is exceptional, exceeding its lines and signalling an inability to function (in English and French) without its attendant v.7
H is not queer in this way. Indeed, for many early modern orthographers, H is not considered a letter. In George Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529), for instance, H is only ‘l’aspiration’, an exhalation or an accent; if it functions as a letter, then it is only through poetic license, a point that French classical scholar Michel Maittaire corroborates 200 years later in his English Grammar (1712) along with Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.8 Sidestepping this controversy, Ben Jonson in his English Grammar (1640) emphasizes that whatever it is – ‘be it a letter or a spirit’ – and whatever work it does, it is feminine. He writes:
H, whether it be a letter or no, hath been examined by the ancients and by some of the Greek party too much condemned, and thrown out of the alphabet as an aspirate merely … But be it a letter or spirit, we have great use of it in our tongue, both before and after vowels. And though I dare not say she is (as I have her one call her) the “Queen mother of Consonants”, “yet she is the life and quickening of c, g, p, s, t, w, or also r when derived from the aspirate Greek rh.”9
Though Jonson’s point is lexical, his claims about H fascinate me, particularly its ability to quicken, aspirate and alter the meaning of other sounds. What work, then, does this queen mother of consonants do in this play and how might we begin to approach its varied textual and sonic meanings?
For me, Beatrice’s H animates a problem latent in Much Ado About Nothing, namely the textual inconsistencies that centre on the complicated character of Margaret.10 Margaret is an enigma in the play – both an intimate member of Leonato’s household yet also clearly a servant within it, Margaret too easily frustrates claims about the bonds between women in this play. What is her role in the Hero plot? How culpable is she in her betrayal? The play is not clear and at times offers contradictory evidence. But her role is an important one. Articulated in an odd exchange between minor characters, H in Much Ado hints at the complex ways in which women related to one another in the past, especially when aspirated on stage.
Merely pronouncing it moves us towards complicated histories, ones rooted in the body. For instance, as one of John Heywood’s An Hundred Epigrams claims, ‘H is worst among letters in the crosse-rowe’, for if it is found in ‘elbow’, ‘arm’, ‘leg’ or into ‘what place soever’, H may ‘pike him’, concluding: ‘Wherever though find ache though shalt not like him.’11 Piking, or losing oneself, is here imagined as finding ‘ache’, a pun that works in two ways (at least in early modern pronunciation).12 It is a pun that Benedict makes as well, warning Margaret that wanton wit is dangerous ‘for maids’, for it leads to putting pikes in a vice, a sexualized image that is also martial and violent (5.1.20–1).
John Taylor, the water poet, also links the letter H with bodily aches in the 1635 edition of his prose pamphlet The World Runs on Wheels: ‘Every cart-horse doth know the letter very understandingly; and H hath he in his bones’.13 Another epigram about ‘dolo intimus’ does the same, explaining that ‘Nor Hauk, nor Hound, nor Hors, those letters hhh, But ach it self, ‘tis Brutus bones attaches’.14 H ‘it self” attaches not to the aspirated sounds of ‘hawk’, ‘hound’ or ‘horse’, but the embodied pain of aging. Margaret’s pun and Beatrice’s reply draw on these meanings: H is a sign both of pleasure and of pain.
Yet hearing H is not so easy. As the epigram ‘dolo intimus’ makes clear (and as any student of phonics quickly learns), H ‘itself’ functions differently than other letters. Unlike ‘A for apple’, or ‘B for bat’, the letter H is not pronounced similarly to the sound it signifies (heard in the word ‘hat’). Confusingly, one must drop an aspirate sound in order to pronounce the letter correctly: ‘aitch’. This trick of the aspirated and un-aspirated H is a historical irony, one steeped in the variances of language transmission across cultures and time.15 Unlike, say, the dictionary definition of the letter F, n. (‘the letter, and the sound it represents’), the definition of H, n., involves alphabetical orientation and complicated etymologies.16
It is perhaps too much to claim that the lost aspirate can be found through historicism, even one that models itself on a queer philology. Yet original pronunciation, like original staging practices, aspires to rediscover just that. How did an early modern actor say Beatrice’s line? How do we? Original pronunciation holds out the tantalizing prospect of aspirating the dropped Hs of history, especially those that might breathe new life into old lines, a point that most critics (and most teachers like myself) emphasize when teaching Much Ado About Nothing. To hear the pun in the title, for example, is to engage with both early modern philology and pronunciation. ‘Nothing’, editors gloss, was a homonym of ‘noting’.17 And what kind of queer philology does she reveal when Beatrice turns orthographer?
Pronounced in early modern English, the play becomes Much Ado About Noting, the dropped h allowing us to weave the play’s complex allusions into a compellingly resonant theme, one that makes a certain amount of sense even to those reading or watching the play for the first time. The play’s emphasis on notes, both written love letters as well as the musical notes that animate its many songs, connects with the broader cultural emphasis on noting that the play stages; who notes what about whom matters in Messina, whether it’s a beloved’s beauty (in Act 1) or her constancy (in Act 4). Editors emphasize that this noting is gendered and misogynistic: ‘nothing’ is visually linked to ‘no thing’, unlocking yet another pun in the title, one that drew upon the slang term for women’s vaginas. One only needs to cross-reference similar puns made by Hamlet and Iago to see how early modern misogyny is embedded in this ‘nothing’.
Yet this historical insistence on airy nothing becomes hazier when we dwell on its silent h, an absence that widens the gap between the misogyny of the play, imaginatively located in the past, and its resonance with misogyny in the present. We can’t know for sure how H sounded. Early modern H and its aspirated and unaspirated sounds at times seems to function much in the same way as modern H does – a dropped H usually marks class and education (such as when Bottom pronounces ‘Hercules’ as ‘Ercules’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream) but so too does insistence on its pronunciation establish educational credentials (such as Holofernes, in Loves Labours Lost, who insists on adding an h to abominable). Likewise, H rhymes with both ‘ake’ and ‘aitch’, a point that the critical explication of Caliban’s line in the Tempest – ‘I’ll rack the with old cramps, fill all thy bones with Aches …’ (1.2.433) – brings home. The meter is better if Caliban’s ‘aches’ rhymes with aitches; and Boswell, in making a case for this pronunciation, uses Beatrice’s joke in Much Ado as evidence for this.
Other times, its arcane pronunciation seems only to emphasize how much time has passed. Original pronunciation has the potential to aspirate some lost meanings; whether we can hear them is more complicated. For instance, one of the hardest aspects for modern audiences engaging with original pronunciation performances are the linguistic contextual cues. In his work on staging a performance of Romeo and Juliet with an emphasis on original pronunciation, David Crystal noted that H was particularly tricky: knowing when and where to drop the h signalled in multiple ways, locating a character within complex social co-ordinates, including provenance, education, class status and class mobility. It simply wasn’t clear which characters would drop their Hs and why.18
Likewise, we may hear H differently. It is possible, for instance, that H is a modern phenomenon, a claim that Helge Kökeritz makes in Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. Noting that West-Midland dialects included a notable amount of dropped h’s, Kökeritz hypothesizes that Shakespeare would have dropped his hs more than not. London-based actors, Kökertiz argues, would have done so as well. Pointing towards Shakespearean puns like ‘art-heart, eat-hate, heir apparent-here apparent, here-year, and perhaps Hiren-Irene-hiring’, Kökertiz argues that the evidence suggests a weak articulation of initial hs, though he notes that it’s near impossible to know for sure how these puns were articulated in the past or whether this was a localized phenomenon.19
Margaret, for instance, hears in Beatrice’s cry of ‘Hey ho’ a number of potential cultural references. Her quick response suggests possible ways to finish the sentence, all of which emphasize the aspirated sound: ‘hawk, horse, husband’. H patterns as an opening consonant in all three words, blurring distinctions between their different vowel sounds. To pronounce Margaret’s list of aitches is to pun on disappearing differences.
It is also to engage with complex cultural tropes that shape the articulation itself. Is Beatrice mimicking the sound of a falconer, whose cry of ‘hey-ho’ is a key part of taming the falcon to serve its master? Is she positioning herself as the tamer and not the tamed? Does her cry of ‘hey-ho’ for a horse mimic the salacious and diabolical calls of witches, marking her desire for diabolical mastery? Or is she echoing the popular ballad ‘hey-ho for a husband’, a cry linked to the longing of a sad, single woman? Margaret’s quick reply (with its own breathy articulation) offers a number of complicated ways to finish the sentence.
As an aural pun, Beatrice’s pronunciation of desire for ‘H’ shifts the sounds of the scene, away from Margaret’s excessive assonance in her emphasis of hawk, horse and especially husband. Just prior to Beatrice’s entrance, Margaret mocks Hero’s ‘heavy heart’ by connecting it to desire to feel a ‘heavy’ husband (3.4.22–5). While Hero finds her joke about the weight of love obscene – ‘Fie upon the! Art not ashamed?’ – Margaret refuses such shame, suggesting that it is only ‘bad thinking’ that ‘wrests true speaking’ (32). She asks Hero, and the audience, breathily: ‘is there harm in the heavier for a husband’?
Margaret seems to know that the answer is yes. In this minor scene, she puns about not just the objects and effects of desire, but also its articulation. Margaret is quick-witted; too often, she is ignored. Beatrice’s playful foreclosing of textual explication, shortening both the sentence and the word that names her desire, produces a different kind of pleasure, one rooted in speaking and hearing words. Malapropisms, homonyms and word play abound in Much Ado About Nothing, as does slander; the pleasure of noting may also be a revelry in nothingness, the airy breath of language that provides the tenuous connection between Beatrice and Benedict, just as it undoes the bond between Claudio and Hero. Margaret seems to know this, spelling out what some refuse to hear.
Beatrice’s brilliant and short rebuke refuses such wordplay. Not to be bested, Margaret interprets Beatrice’s desire for H as a sound as well as a sign that she has ‘turned Turk’, converting from a spinster into a lover of Benedict. No longer imagined as a witch with the power to ‘spell him backward’ (3.1.61), Beatrice is now a renagado, converting for love.20 The metaphorical implication of this particular phrase suggests not only a profound shift in orientation, marked by religious conversion, but also, potentially, a performance style. In early modern travel writing, the aspirated H sound was a sonic marker of ethnic difference, especially of religious others too easily categorized as ‘barbarous’.21 Pietro Anghiera, for instance, emphasizes that the inhabitants of Hispaniola ‘breath out these aspirations ha, he, hi, ho as the Hebrewes and Arabians are to pronounce theirs’, that is, ‘with open mouths and shaking breasts’.22 Rerouting Beatrice’s desire for H back into the gulling plot of the play, Margaret connects Beatrice to a histrionic performance style, one linked with barbarous others.23 Confused, Beatrice questions her meaning. Margaret replies, continuing the alphabet/homonym play from airy Hs to empty Is and Ayes: ‘Nothing I, but God sends everyone their heart’s desire’ (3.4.54).
That it is Margaret, and not Beatrice, who aspirates the most in this scene is ironic: if Beatrice’s desire for H marks a textual crux, Margaret’s airy nothing here threatens to upend the play itself, marking not only important textual incongruities, but also plot holes. What does she desire and why is she invested in Beatrice’s sigh? What kind of character is she?
We might, for instance, read her as a female analogue to Don John, a character who is outside of the romantic plot, yet can interpret its narrative clearly and more easily than others within it. Margaret knows there is no sound of H in honour, a point that soon damns Hero. And so does Don John; merely pronouncing her name – ‘Leonato’s Hero, your Hero, every man’s Hero’ – is enough to alter Claudio’s perception of her honour.24 Likewise, the assonance of Don Pedro in the accusation scene is striking:
see her, hear her, at the hour last night
Talk with a ruffian at her chamber-window,
Who hath, indeed, like a most liberal villain,
Confess’d the vile encounters they have had
A thousand times in secret.
(3.5.10; emphasis mine)
This is part of the proof that damns Hero. Don Pedro’s aspirated, angry exhalations animate the missing scene but also link it to a chain of others.
Margaret’s Hs rather than Beatrice’s have come back to haunt Hero. But Margaret is no plain-dealing villain like Don John, nor is she a ‘liberal’ one like Borachio. Rather, she is a bit of a textual cipher, so much so that some critics argue that her character’s inconsistences – her sudden appearance during the masque ball (when additional women characters are needed) and her notable absence at Hero’s wedding – reveal more about Shakespeare’s writing process then any theme of the play.25 Like other ‘ghost characters’ in the play, Margaret suggests that Shakespeare may have shifted the plot as he was developing it. For example, Hero’s mother, Innogen, is mentioned in stage directions for Acts 1 and 2 in both the Quarto (1600) and Folio (1623) editions of Much Ado, but she seems to have been wholly forgotten by Act 3, and it’s hard to imagine what her reaction would be to Hero’s humiliation in Act 4. It’s hard to imagine how a director might stage her.26
Most editions (from Lewes Theobald’s onwards) erase her, ‘tidying up’ the text.27 The same is true for Leonato’s nameless ‘kinsman’, whose presence is equally confusing. Some editors interpret Balthasar as this kinsman, but as Stanley Wells quips, such interpretations only reveal how far we are willing to go to assume ‘that the play is not itself confused’.28
Margaret functions in this way: she and Ursula suddenly appear during the masque sequence of 2.1, though no mention is made of their entrance.29 Likewise, her role in the plot is equally confusing: a minor character, one that is essential to the Hero plot, she seems both intimately at home in Leonato’s household and not fully welcome in it. Her absence at the wedding scene for which she helps her mistress dress seems all the more striking, as does her silence afterwards. In his essay on Shakespeare’s use of his source materials, literary critic Allan Gilbert begins with a simple question, one that I have often pondered with my students and one that critics link to the play’s defect in the plot: ‘In Much Ado About Nothing, when Claudio rejects Hero, why does not Margaret tell the truth’?30
Though she is absent in the immediate accusation, one imagines that it would not be hard, narratively speaking, to summon Margaret and clarify what happened. The public humiliation that Claudio and Don Pedro stage at Hero’s wedding along with Leonato’s subsequent private attack on his daughter certainly would warrant a response. But Margaret remains silent, offering no easy solution: rather, the constables of the watch and their bumbling leader Dogberry track down Margaret’s lover, Borachio, who in a fit of conscience confesses (both the plot and his love for Margaret). In the absence of plot, we get dramatic comedy.
In a play that stages the ways that Hero both is and is not ‘the sign and semblance of honor’, what is Margaret? Michelle Dowd, for instance, describes her as ‘a substitute and, ultimately a scapegoat for her mistress’.31 Although Hero is ultimately exonerated from the textual shame of slander, Margaret is not. Leonato’s final words on the matter pronounce her culpable: ‘Margaret was in some fault for this, / Although against her will, as it appears / In the true course of all the question’ (5.4.4–6).
Like Innogen, Margaret’s evolution from Shakespeare’s source materials seems to suggest clues about the development of the play. Matteo Bandello’s La Prima Parte de le Novelle (1554), which may have provided Shakespeare with the Hero-plot as well as the setting of Messina, does not involve a disguised female servant. Rather, the Hero character (Finicia) is undone by an elaborate ruse devised by the Don John character (Girondo), involving a perfumed servant (Borrachio) making bold claims that are overheard by the Claudio character (Sir Timbreo). Shakespeare’s elaboration of Bandello’s plot included adding Margaret, though her culpability in the play is less clear than in the source materials he drew upon. Critics compare Margaret, for instance, with her literary antecedents – Delinda in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Pyrene in Spenser’s Faerie Queene – in order to emphasize what is uniquely Shakespearean about the play (most notably, the Beatrice and Benedict sub-plot), but also Margaret’s hazy guilt.
In Shakespeare’s source material, this episode is presented more ‘directly and forcibly’, and there is no question about her character’s culpability.32 In the fifth canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, for instance, Dalinda, a servant who is much poorer than her mistress, Generva, understands that her lover Polynesso desires her mistress for her beauty and for her social status; at his request, she dresses in Generva’s clothes, and welcomes him into her mistress’s bedchamber purportedly to help him over his love for Generva through sexual role-playing. Dalinda is unaware that her lover has duped her; when given the chance, she confesses her role in deceiving Generva’s betrothed.33 Likewise Spenser’s plot elaborates on the role of the maid. Whereas Dalinda wears her mistress’s clothes to please her mate, Spenser’s Pyrene does so to please herself. As Alwin Thaler summarized: ‘Spenser’s Pyrene is less obtuse than Ariosto’s Dalinda, less blameworthy for her part in the deceit, and less disproportionately obtrusive in the action. In all this she anticipates Shakespeare’s Margaret’.34
For the plot to work, we must believe that, like Dalinda, Margaret is willing to engage in such sexual role-playing with Borachio. But how much or what exactly this involves is unclear. Shakespeare’s play references too many, yet also not enough details. One’s left hunting for clues in the text itself. Borachio’s seduction of Margaret is mentioned no less than five times: Borachio’s initial boast to Don John (2.2.44), Don John’s baiting of Claudio (3.2.101–2), Borachio’s boast of what happened to Conrade (3.3.138–45), Don Pedro’s accusation of Hero (4.1.88–94) and finally Borachio’s confession to Claudio (5.1.221–34). Read together, they suggest strikingly different narratives of what happened. Does Borachio woo Margaret in Hero’s clothes from the ground like in Ariosto’s tale? Does he merely enter the room, pretending that he is welcomed by a lover as in Bandello’s novella? Shakespeare’s play is unclear.
The critical reception of Margaret has varied over time. For some, Margaret’s willingness to wear her mistress’s clothes is plausible, especially since, in the words of David Bevington, Shakespeare ‘mitigates’ the ‘kink-iness’ latent in Dalinda’s plot.35 Likewise, Alwin Thaler concludes that for all of her ‘spicy talk’, there is ‘no harm in her’.36 For others, Margaret is culpable and her sex with Borachio was a ‘piece of shabby knavery, done in the dark for money’.37 Some find her plot tangential: Stephen Booth connects Margaret (and her unexpected word play) with the history of performance. Her spontaneous quick-wittedness on the morning of Hero’s wedding, for Booth, is part of a pattern in Shakespeare’s plays, one in which young women characters routinely and unrelatedly erupt in bursts of quick, mean-spirited exchanges with one another. This, he surmises, may have had more to do with providing young male actors practice in playing the female part before taking on more substantial roles.38
Other critics find her essential: Diana Henderson, for example, argues that Margaret’s role is key to depicting how women speak to one another in private, an important juxtaposition to the male realm of Messina, allowing women to talk amongst themselves.39 In performance, this may allow the audience to hear a very different Hero, a point that Henderson brings to bear on Branagh’s 1993 film, which in Henderson’s opinion foreshortens such possibilities by cutting this scene entirely and visually depicting what Borrachio only describes in the playtext.40 Branagh drops Beatrice’s desire for H in order to solve a much bigger textual mystery: how Borachio could pull off this elaborate and ornate ruse. Shot from the perspective of the peeping Claudio, the film stages Borachio’s consummation of sex with Margaret. Such visual evidence smooths over textual inconsistencies, a choice that was seen as key to the film’s critical success.41
Part of the pleasure of Much Ado About Nothing, though, is its textuality, especially its wordplay. Dropping Beatrice’s H may simplify the plot, and resolve some of the textual inconsistencies about Margaret, but it does so at a cost, namely erasing any trace of the uneasy and fraught alliances between women, especially when talking about sex. And it’s harder to excise H completely: while Claudio penitently mourns at Hero’s grave, a song of woe is played, whose refrain asks for help ‘to sigh, and groan, / Heavily, Heavily’, … ‘till death be uttered, / Heavily, Heavily’ (5.3.17–20).
Much has been said about the queer and not-so-queer aspects of this romantic comedy, especially the ways in which it enacts a seemingly inevitable reproductive futurism even as it renders women replaceable: ‘Another Hero!’ (5.4.62). If, as Benedict argues, the ‘world must be peopled’, then the play stages the stakes of that social pact. As Ann Pellegrini summarizes, ‘the will to be single cannot hold against the call to be married, or be no one at all’.42 Beatrice and Benedict are gulled into happy coupledom: ‘Here are our own hands against our hearts’ (5.4.91). Pellegrini’s queer critique focuses on Don John, reading his ‘will to be single’ as one way to imagine the ‘other scenes’ and ‘other pleasures’ seemingly impossible within the social world of the play. Toggling between Sondheim’s Company and Shakespeare’s play, Pellegrini argues for a different way of imagining both queer communities and queer company. H, and other textual ciphers hidden in the play text, including Margaret, may do the same.
Mentioned in the stage directions of 5.4, Margaret is onstage throughout the final scene, including when Leonato pronounces that she was ‘in some fault’, yet she is silent throughout. This wedding day is markedly different then before. The play offers no clues of Hero’s reaction to her presence, or of Beatrice’s: all four women are silent, brought onstage by Leonato only to be dismissed again.
When the women return, they are masked; called forth by their paramours, Hero and Beatrice reveal themselves. Unhailed by what Pellegrini terms the ‘call to marriage’, Margaret and Ursula remain silent throughout the final scene. Indeed, Margaret is silent for most of Act 5, except for some quick-witted, obscene punning with Benedict in 5.2 about sonnets and sex, punning on her social position in Leonato’s household and the implicit social effects of marriage on one’s station in life (‘why shall I always keep below the stairs’) a point that resonates rather ominously since she has, indeed, ascended them in order to play the part of Hero.
Leonato’s questioning of her, especially her culpability in impersonating Hero, is left for another day. The play ends without clarifying whether she was aware of Borachio’s plan or not (or whether either of these couples will last). Instead, it offers us a theatrical spectacle. Calling for the music that will end the play on a comic note, Benedict asks for a dance before ‘we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives’ heels’ (5.4.115–17). That he echoes Margaret’s previous pun about heavy hearts and heavy husbands is perhaps a coincidence, but I prefer to interpret it as a sign that, somehow, he has heard the women of the play, and how they speak to one another. Beatrice’s desire for H and Margaret’s ability to aspirate it does not clearly animate an alternative orthography of love. But if we listen closely, we may hear in Benedict’s ‘halting sonnet’ more than just a ‘hard’ rhyme attuned to normative desire and misogyny. Its pronouncement might contain a queer exhalation that’s hard to explain, but equally hard to dismiss.