Viola, Imogen, Beatrice
When I think of the family of Rosalind’s cross-dressing ‘sisters’, almost her coeval is Viola who disguises herself as a boy, Cesario, in Twelfth Night. While As You Like It is usually dated 1599-1600, Twelfth Night is thought to follow in 1600-1601. I have seen an array of Violas from Judi Dench at Stratford in 1969 to Jodie McNee at the rejuvenated Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 2014. These actors, including Johnny Flynn in an all male production at the Apollo in 2013, have explored a range of gender stereotypes, from girly girls who never even tried to stride like a man, to authentic gasp-inducing lookalikes with Viola’s twin brother Sebastian. Jodie McNee worked with choreographer Charlotte Broom to nail the physical aspects of impersonating a man, studying the mannerisms of her co-star Luke Jerdy. ‘It was very liberating. You often look at a fella and their bodies are very open. And a woman often closes down her body, crossing her legs or folding her arms over. It’s very interesting, the psychology of it.’1
Disguise as a man and gender ambiguity are integral to any interpretation of either Rosalind or Viola. But whereas Rosalind is emboldened by her new male authority in Arden, Viola’s attitude to her boy’s disguise and to her own sex is more rueful and meditative in Illyria.
| Viola | Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness, Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. How easy is it for the proper false In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms! Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, For such as we are made of, such we be.2 |
Viola feels trapped in her masculine disguise. Not only does her male identity as Cesario entice Olivia into falling in love with someone she can’t have in that time and place, it also prevents Viola from expressing her own love to Orsino. Today Olivia might have an affair with Viola, Phebe might have a fling with Rosalind, and Celia could live as Rosalind’s girl friend. In 1599 and ever after, Rosalind finds being Ganymede enables her to speak her mind, and to speak her love to Orlando. Both Rosalind and Viola blur the boundaries between the sexes in their discussion of love. But while Viola, ‘poor monster’, is an uneasy synthesis of Viola and Cesario, Rosalind finds triumphant liberation by fusing herself with Ganymede.
Rosalind goes further than Viola. She takes on a dizzying extra layer of identity by playing herself, a woman, in her dating games with Orlando. Feste the Fool insinuates that Cesario is really female, ‘Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard,’ but Orsino doesn’t even half guess the truth. He’s too absorbed by self-love, and love of love – which he mistakes for love of Olivia – to notice Viola’s passion for him. When he asks Cesario if he’s met a woman to love, Orsino remains obstinately dense.
| Orsino | My life upon’t, young though thou art, thine eye Hath stayed upon some favour that it loves. Hath it not, boy? |
| Viola | A little, by your favour. |
| Orsino | What kind of woman is’t? |
| Viola | Of your complexion. |
| Orsino | She is not worth thee then. What years, i’ faith? |
| Viola | About your years, my lord.3 |
Although both Viola and Rosalind fall in love at first sight, loving seems less complex for Viola than it does for Rosalind who won’t be satisfied until she’s explored all its inherent risks. More pensive Viola concurs with Orsino that
| women are as roses, whose fair flower | |
| Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.4 |
Has Viola less time on her side than Rosalind? Is she slightly older? Director Peter Hall thinks the play itself is ‘moving into maturity.’5 There’s a still, calm centre to Viola whereas Rosalind’s whirring brain is constantly in motion. I sense a melancholy shade to Viola whereas Rosalind revels in high spirits. Viola knows what longing for love feels like and it’s immovable as statuary. In code, as if describing a lost sister, Cesario tells Orsino of the monumental numbness of unspoken, unspeakable love.
| Viola | A blank, my lord: she never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i‘th’ bud Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? We men may say more, swear more, but indeed Our shows are more than will: for still we prove Much in our vows, but little in our love.6 |
For William Hazlitt, the impassioned sweetness of Viola’s confession of her covert love for Orsino, aroused his deepest emotion. Her words ‘vibrate on the heart, like the sounds which the passing wind draws from the trembling strings of a harp left on some desert shore!’7
Viola/Cesario falls deeply in love with Orsino, at the same time as Orsino continues to profess love for Olivia who has developed a wild crush on Cesario. Through these complications Shakespeare suggests we all contain several degrees of sexual ambiguity. Beneath our binary outsides of feminine and masculine, bubble layers of psychological complexity. This was made visual in Trevor Nunn’s sumptuous 1996 film of Twelfth Night in which Imogen Stubbs played Viola. Following the wreck, Viola is rescued but believes Sebastian her twin brother drowned. Landing in enemy territory, she disguises herself as Cesario, a boy emigrant. In an unusual interpolation we see Viola physically transform. Her long hair is cut short with a large pair of scissors, her corset unlaced, her breasts bound flat – and suddenly she can pass for a youth. It’s a filmic version of the explicit scene in Two Gentlemen of Verona when Lucetta lewdly equips Julia with a codpiece. Stubbs’s Viola puts on a pencil moustache, practises a male stride and drops her voice. She’s sexually ambiguous, rather than the convincing boy Jodie McNee made as Cesario in 2014. In the film we even see Stubbs privately unbind her breasts for a moment’s respite as she blames male disguise for proving ‘a wickedness’.
But the ambivalence lingers. For Orsino muses that compared with ‘dear lad’ Cesario,
| Diana’s lip | |
| Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman’s part.8 |
At the finale, when Orsino has decided to fall in love with Viola, now confessedly a woman, he still continues to call her ‘Boy and indeed on the Elizabethan stage in the person of a boy actor, s/he would have been exactly that. W.H. Auden thought it impossible to believe that changeable Orsino could make Viola a good husband. He gives ‘the impression of simply having abandoned one dream for another.’9
Viola’s love for flighty Orsino, whose ‘mind is a very opal,’ seems far less comprehensible than Rosalind’s love for playful and honourable Orlando. But perhaps that’s the point about love. It’s an expression of the person doing the loving rather than an accurate valuation of the object of that love. It’s just as hard to understand why Julia retains her love for fickle Proteus in Two Gentlemen. Both Orsino and Proteus are giddy and unreliable while Viola and Julia remain staunchly but perplexingly loyal. By delving into the real intentions of Orlando, challenging and testing him, Rosalind finds her true and equal contemporary. Examining Orlando’s love, Rosalind finds out about her own. She has ecstatic epiphanies about the scope of her love, ‘as boundless as the sea,’ as deep as ‘the unknown bottom’ of the Bay of Portugal. It’s entirely appropriate that argumentative, passionate Rosalind mostly speaks in sinewy prose, whereas Viola’s natural element is blank verse. Her rarefied, poetic vision of love, ‘like Patience on a monument,’ is a response to Orsino’s misogynistic view of women.
| Orsino | There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart...10 |
In their male disguises, both Ganymede/Rosalind and Cesario/Viola have to reject stereotypes of female loving and are asked to deal humanely with the comedy and the cruelty of attracting inappropriate admirers. Phebe falls irretrievably in love with Ganymede at first sight, as Olivia falls for Cesario. Both women prefer these ‘sweet youths’ to their allowed suitors, Silvius and Orsino. But Rosalind and Viola deal differently with their would-be lovers. Rosalind is curt, even brutal with Phebe.
| Rosalind | Why do you look on me? |
| I see no more in you than in the ordinary Of Nature’s sale-work. ...I pray you do not fall in love with me, For I am falser than vows made in wine. Besides, I like you not.11 |
Rosalind is a born educator and just as she lectures Orlando, she wants to teach Phebe the truth about love. Rosalind thinks Phebe should learn to value Silvius and not set her sights on impossible Ganymede.
Viola takes a more empathetic approach to Olivia’s misplaced love for ‘boy’ Cesario. She identifies with Olivia’s unlooked-for love and mentally compares it with her own passion for Orsino.
| Viola | I am the man: if it be so, as ’tis, Poor lady, she were better love a dream. ...How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly, And I, poor monster, fond as much on him, And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me: What will become of this? As I am man, My state is desperate for my master’s love: As I am woman (now alas the day!) What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?12 |
Viola feels herself a ‘monster’ because of her equivocal position between male and female. But, like Rosalind with Phebe, she has to remain firm with the deluded Olivia. Viola tries her best to explain:
| Viola | By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, And that no woman has; nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.13 |
Even in comedies, it takes courage and enterprise to survive as the asylum seekers Rosalind and Viola are in Arden and Illyria, with false identities and as the other sex. They are both intimately acquainted with death and exile. Rosalind has had sentence of death passed on her. Viola has survived shipwreck. Both rise above death and know the only answer is love and desire. Mortality knocks at the door of life and both Rosalind and Viola answer it with their transcendent loves.
In Shakespeare’s early comedies, unmarried young heroines are the centres of interest, symbols of moral value, and conduits of emotional truth. Women rarely fulfil these functions again until his late plays. Here we meet once more young women who embody virtue, freshness and desire: Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Marina in Pericles and Miranda in The Tempest. We also meet married women whose unblemished reputations are first threatened and then vindicated: Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Rosalind’s closer relation, Imogen in Cymbeline, thought to have been written 1609-10 but certainly by 1611.
Of these heroines, only Imogen imitates Rosalind by getting into male disguise when she is forced by a cruel turn of the plot to crossdress as Fidele. The pseudonym she chooses, meaning faithful, is an emblem of her undying love for Posthumus, her doubting husband. She retains this shining, selfless love through the many trials life throws at her. ‘We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for Posthumus; and she deserves it better,’ noted Hazlitt.14 Imogen’s resolute love, as well as her masquerade as a boy, links her with both Rosalind and Viola. However, even as Fidele, Imogen remains innately feminine, like ‘the azured harebell’, whereas Rosalind’s Ganymede exults in her new swashbuckling, laddish persona. Rosalind’s gender is interestingly volatile where Imogen’s never is.
In one of his notorious attempts to improve Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw ‘refinished’ Cymbeline in 1936, making Imogen a more up-to-date woman for the twentieth century. In Shaw’s version, reconstructed Imogen is reluctant to return to Posthumus, her once suspicious husband, so she decides, a generation before the UK’s Divorce Reform Act of 1969, ‘I must go home and make the best of it, as other women must.’15 Her change of gender has not changed her essential self. Yet Posthumus no more recognises the feminine in Fidele than Orsino does in Cesario, or Orlando in Ganymede. In Shakespeare’s comedies we accept this convention as a droll comment on the blindness of lovers. But in Cymbeline, Posthumus’ failure to recognise either his wife’s unchangeable fidelity, or the real Imogen disguised as Fidele, speaks of the malign power of men’s sexual jealousy. When finally everything is resolved and nearly everyone reconciled in Cymbeline, we still feel the intensity of this theme reverberating from The Rape of Lucrece, through Othello, via The Winter’s Tale and into Shakespeare’s other late romances.
Imogen, daughter of King Cymbeline of Britain, has secretly married lower-ranked Posthumus. However, her wicked fairy-tale stepmother is plotting that her own son, the loutish Cloten, should marry Imogen. Banished from Britain, Posthumus gives Imogen a bracelet and receives from her a ring before he sets off for Rome. Once there he boasts about his wife’s virtue to Iachimo, an Italian stage villain. Contemporary audiences would have recognised this figure as the devil incarnate from the popular xenophobic proverb, Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato! He bets Posthumus that he will be able to seduce immaculate Imogen.
Iachimo fails, but in revenge steals into Imogen’s bedchamber stowed in a trunk. He minutely observes her sleeping body, especially the mole under her left breast, and slides off her precious bracelet. Iachimo’s description of Imogen’s physical beauty flags her inner grace.
| Iachimo | Cytherea, |
| How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! fresh lily! And whiter than the sheets!16 |
Iachimo salivating over Imogen recalls Tarquin in Shakespeare’s 1594 poem, The Rape of Lucrece, about the assault on a virtuous woman’s chastity, sparked by her husband’s boasting of her virtue. Both poem and play have a Roman setting, and the rape, or attempted rape in the case of Imogen, are political actions between male enemies.
| Iachimo | On her left breast |
| A mole cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip. Here’s a voucher, Stronger than ever law could make; this secret Will force him think I have pick’d the lock, and ta’en The treasure of her honour.17 |
Imogen’s physical impact must be evoked as the plot turns on it. However, her beauty defies the ‘blazon’ or catalogue of feminine bodily perfections common in courtly romance, so we only glimpse one exquisite detail about her mole. Its exact position on her body makes us all voyeurs. With this logged in his brain, it’s easy for Iachimo to convince Posthumus that he has indeed slept with Imogen. Believing the lie turns Posthumus into a rampant misogynist, recalling the sexual rages of Othello or Leontes.
| Posthumus | Could I find out |
| The woman’s part in me – for there’s no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it, The woman’s: flattering, hers: deceiving, hers: Lust, and rank thoughts, hers, hers...18 |
In his sense of impotence and humiliation, he chooses to forget his wife’s flawless purity and hires Pisanio to murder her.
Posthumus’s accusation incites Imogen’s fury. Her argumentative powers, sarcastic questioning and outraged tone make her a sister to Rosalind.
| Imogen | False to his bed? What is it to be false? To lie in watch there, and to think on him? To weep ’twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge Nature, To break it with a fearful dream of him, And cry myself awake? That’s false to’s bed, is it?19 |
Rosalind’s language is equally forceful and courageous when she repudiates her uncle’s accusations with her dignified stand: ‘Treason is not inherited, my lord.../My father was no traitor.’20 Both Rosalind and Imogen suffer from toxic family members. Pisanio reveals her husband’s death threat to Imogen and advises her to leave the British court and make for Milford Haven to meet the Roman forces. On his advice she transforms into a boy, foregoes her status as a princess, and exposes her porcelain complexion to the tanning sun. ‘I see into thy end, and am almost/A man already.’21
In Yukio Ninagawa’s dreamlike Japanese production of Cymbeline at the Barbican in 2012, a moon hung over Imogen/Fidele as she trundled her suitcase on the way to Milford Haven. All in black, she was not a man, but a generic forsaken refugee as she appeared in front of an eighteenth-century engraving of a cave set in sublime nature.
| Imogen | I see a man’s life is a tedious one, I have tired myself: and for two nights together Have made the ground my bed. I should be sick, But that my resolution helps me.22 |
If Shinobu Otake didn’t look masculine, this petite Japanese actress was able to assume masculine tones. Aged fifty-four, she looked like a boy of about twelve rather than a man, very touching in her new role as Fidele, constantly loyal to her faithless husband in the face of his betrayal.
| Imogen | My dear lord, |
| Thou art one o’ th’ false ones! Now I think on thee, My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was At point to sink, for food.23 |
She still feels total commitment to her husband, even in the grotesque scene when she wakes beside the headless body of Cloten which she mistakes for Posthumus. Believing this to be her husband’s dead body, she plans to strew his grave with ‘wild wood-leaves’ and say ‘a century of prayers.’ ‘Now this is the very religion of love,’ said Hazlitt. ‘She all along relies little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of Italy; she relies on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy.’24 Imogen also inspires her two long-lost kidnapped brothers – unaware of their own true identity and of hers – to sing the most plangent lines in Shakespeare, their dirge for Fidele, the ‘boy’ fugitive they believe dead.
| Guiderius | Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages, Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.25 |
Sir Ian McKellen saw Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen in 1957 and never forgot her impact. ‘The beauty and grace of Imogen was so overpowering, that I fancied it was all for my benefit alone. I had seen Dame Peggy up close, when I got her autograph and I knew she was, in life, old enough to be Imogen’s mother. But from the back of the stalls, she was essential youth, in voice and gesture: I think I realised that Imogen is a great part – but how did Ashcroft do it? This divinity was beyond what I knew of acting.’26 There is a kind of divinity about Imogen’s fortitude, as she persists in loving her disloyal husband, and enlists in the wars between Rome and Britain.
The play concludes with a labyrinthine round of fairy-tale revelations that lead to reconciliation and forgiveness. Posthumus is eventually restored and reunited with Imogen.
| Imogen | Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? Think that you are upon a rock, and now Throw me again. [Embracing him] |
| Posthumus | Hang there like fruit, my soul, |
| Till the tree die.27 |
Posthumus absolves Iachimo and tells him to ‘Live,/And deal with others better.’ Cymbeline forgives banished lord Belarius for abducting his two sons and proclaims, ‘Pardon’s the word to all’. The war between the Romans and the British is resolved into a peace treaty. Imogen never resumes her female clothes as, depending on the production, Rosalind need never resume hers. Ninagawas Cymbeline concluded with a slow motion dance round a single pine tree, not Shakespeare’s lofty cedar, symbolic of regeneration following the devastating tsunami of 2011 in Japan.
Imogen, like Rosalind, is the proper subject and heroine of her play. But unlike Rosalind, it’s Imogen’s ‘conjugal tenderness’ that is ‘the chief subject of the drama and the pervading charm of her character,’ said Victorian critic, Anna Jameson. But she was quick to modify her judgement, ‘it is not true, I think, that she is merely interesting from her tenderness and constancy to her husband.’ Jameson found some component parts of Shakespeare’s earlier heroines in Imogen.
When Harriet Walter played the role a century and a half later for the RSC in Stratford and London, she too found elements of other characters in Imogen: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Lady Anne, Cleopatra, and of course, Rosalind. Though ‘unusually, in Imogen’s case, maleness does not bring with it authority... Imogen is forced to reach a more quintessential definition of herself. She has had to slough off ‘Imogen’ like an old skin, and underneath she finds ‘Fidele’, the faithful one... With her boy disguise the pressure is somehow off Imogen and off the player of Imogen. The emotional drive relaxes, and there is more opportunity for comedy and lyricism.’ Walter compared Imogen’s journey with the journey the audience makes. ‘The barriers of sex, birth and nation have been broken down. We begin to honour the bonds instead of perpetuating the divisions. Forgiveness is within our range...A society has been purged...and reborn. Glasnost is given a chance...All the principal characters have been through trial of their faith, confrontation with death, resurrection and reconciliation.’28
This is also true in As You Like It where the main characters triumph over their trials of faith: Orlando’s love for Rosalind is proved, and equally Rosalind’s love for Orlando; as well as Silvius’s love for Phebe. Confrontations with death have been surmounted: Orlando survives Oliver’s threat to burn him alive, and against the odds, wins the wrestling match against the champion; Rosalind escapes her uncle’s capital sentence; and at great personal risk Orlando rescues his brother from snake and lioness. The play ends in reconciliation with repentance by Oliver and Duke Frederick, Jaques’ choice of the contemplative life, Phebe’s concession to Silvius, the re-discovered amity between both sets of brothers, and Ganymede’s rebirth to a full range of human potential as Rosalind.
Many actresses have played Imogen, from Sarah Siddons to Dakota Johnson, the more exposed star of Fifty Shades of Grey, in a 2015 film of Cymbeline. When Ellen Terry, who always lamented never being cast as Rosalind, played Imogen, people said, ‘Oh what a Rosalind she would have made!’ Both she and her audience felt her temperament and her genius were the perfect match with Rosalind.
Beatrice doesn’t cross-dress like Rosalind but she does repeat three times that she wishes to be a man, avid for the freedom of action denied to her sex in 1600.29 As Much Ado was probably written between 1598-9, entered in the Stationer’s Register and printed in a quarto edition of 1600, Shakespeare wrote Beatrice and Rosalind’s plays almost at the same moment. But Beatrice seems older and worldly-wiser. Like Rosaline who shared a disrupted history with Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Beatrice is bruised from a previous encounter with Benedick who once ‘lent’ her his heart awhile.
Rosalind and Beatrice share a temperamental affinity. They delight in verbal fireworks and find themselves in similarly fractured families. Both are motherless, both conspicuous nieces who live in their uncles’ households as cousin-companions. These female cousins love them, though Beatrice’s Hero is far less loyal and effective than Rosalind’s Celia. But the major difference between Rosalind and Beatrice is that there’s no lightning bolt of young love at first sight between Beatrice and Benedick as there is between Rosalind and Orlando. Instead there’s a clash of mixed messages in competitive repartee, founded with psychological acuity, on deep mutual attraction. Beatrice and Benedick enjoy ‘merry war’, wit and sparring. ‘You always end with a jade’s trick. I know you of old,’ she scolds him. Unlike Rosalind, but similar to Kate, the Shrew, Beatrice is known through Messina as a ‘harpy’. Uncle Leonato tells her, ‘By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get thee a husband, if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue.’30 Dipping an ironic curtsy, early feminism is embedded in her joke:
| Beatrice | It is my cousin’s duty to make curtsy and say, ‘Father, as it please you’: but yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy, and say, ‘Father, as it please me.’31 [my italics] |
Like Rosalind, Beatrice has a zipping brain and a merry heart. ‘There was a star danced and under that was I born.’ The similarity of the Rosalind/Orlando and Beatrice/Benedick courtships is their witty verbal jousting of quips, puns, epigrams, firecrackers, the ‘paper bullets of the brain,’ and almost total use of prose.
The arc of Beatrice and Benedick’s play – because it is their play in spite of strictly being the subplot – is the reverse of As You Like It which opens in potential tragedy before moving on to the high ground of comedy and rationality. Much Ado begins in comedy but the mood darkens as the male plot against Hero unfolds. The men in Much Ado are all professed misogynists. ‘Because I will not do them [women] the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none: and the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor,’ insists Benedick.32 Beatrice has an equally acerbic view of marriage as ‘wooing, wedding and repenting.’
The rasping tenor of Much Ado is more reminiscent of The Taming of the Shrew than it is of As You Like It. Why do Don Pedro’s military men from Aragon returning to Messina hate women so much? Demobbed troops fear women’s sexual appetites and being cuckolded, an age-old obsession for soldiers returning from any wars, who suspect their children may not be their own.
| Don Pedro | I think this is your daughter, [of Hero, Leonato’s daughter.] |
| Leonato | Her mother hath many times told me so.33 |
Suspicion or fear of women may be the reason Don Pedro suggests wooing Hero on Claudio’s behalf. He’s the one with the power and rank, a fixer, a Pandarus, a matchmaker. The bizarre scheme ensures that Hero, heiress and only child of Leonato, has no say in the matter, and that Claudio knows nothing about Hero, other than he likes her looks and her father’s money. ‘In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on.’ He says he ‘dotes’ on Hero – not that he loves her. He craves a mute trophy wife, not a person or a partner. She might as well be a doll.
Benedick, too, is a fortune hunter. One of his main conditions, if ever he were to take a wife in Messina, ‘rich shall she be, that’s certain,’ just like the Shrew’s Petruchio who comes ‘to wive it wealthily in Padua.’ In Benedick’s view, men are both tormented and un-manned by love. Facing up to lippy, foxy Beatrice, ‘My dear Lady Disdain,’ and ‘My Lady Tongue,’ Benedick feels, ‘like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me.’34 So Claudio’s engagement to Beatrice’s cousin, Hero, seems a great betrayal to Benedick. Claudio has translated into ‘Monsieur Love.’ He used to ‘speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and now is he turned orthography – his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.’35 Love does strange things to fellows and turns their language to jelly. It makes them write the sort of love poems Orlando hangs on trees in Arden.
Yet through their friends’ knowing set-up, Beatrice and Benedick, rivals in the sex war, do fall in love and it proves transformative. Though both are cynics outwardly, they are romantics inwardly, and ripe for being ‘tricked’ into love in the uproarious comic heart of the play.
| Benedick | This can be no trick...it seems her affections have their full bent. Love me? Why it must be requited. |
| Beatrice | ...Against my will I am sent to call you in to dinner. |
| Benedick | ...Ha! ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner’ – there’s a double meaning in that.36 |
However impervious people think they are, they can be knocked sideways by the merest possibility of being loved, and loving in return. From the moment Beatrice is fooled into believing Benedick loves her, a dramatic change comes over her. A new gentleness propels her from her usual prose into verse.
| Beatrice | 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...37 |
Verse is the usual medium of choice for lovers but when Benedick admits, still protesting, to loving Beatrice, ‘I love you against my will,’ his love poetry is just as tacky as Orlando’s. He makes a stab at it but ‘cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried. I can find out no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”... No, I was not born under a rhyming planet.’38
The mood changes as Don John’s counterpointing plot against chaste Hero comes to fruition, and like Posthumus in Cymbeline, gullible Claudio denounces his bride as a whore, ‘a rotten orange’, at the altar. Consumed by paternal shame at his daughter’s halted wedding, Leonato is quick to endorse Claudio’s act of treachery. ‘Hath no man’s dagger here a point for me?’ he cries, even as he wishes his daughter dead, ‘Do not live, Hero; do not ope thine eyes...Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?’ Hero has been a commodity and now that she’s disgraced and worthless, she might as well be dead.
‘What shocked me was how the men turn like a pack of dogs on an innocent woman,’ said Meera Syal who played Beatrice in an Indian take on Much Ado for the RSC in 2012. ‘Rehearsing that wedding scene was shocking, and it contained echoes of other things I’m involved with. I’m the patron of the Newham Asian Women’s Project and we fund refuges for women escaping violent marriages. These are real. Fifty per cent of cases of women being taken to police stations in India are to do with domestic violence. There is a dowry death – where a woman is killed by her husband because she didn’t bring enough money with her as a dowry – every day in India. At least one. And it spoke to Shakespeare’s own age as it does to ours.’
Friar Francis, who is now dealing with a brutal jilting rather than a wedding, and Hero, the bride, in a dead faint at the altar, comes up with a scheme, the same that Friar Lawrence proposes to Juliet, and Paulina offers Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. Feign death and ‘die to live.’ The Friar’s stoical message to Hero, the moral more usually of Shakespeare’s tragedies than his comedies, is ‘Have patience and endure.’
The vicious débâcle between Hero and Claudio triggers Beatrice and Benedick into their avowals of love, voiced entirely in prose, and pitches them into urgent discussion about how to deal with Claudio.
| Benedick | I do love nothing in the world so well as you – is not that strange? |
| Beatrice | ...You have stayed me in a happy hour, I was about to protest I loved you. |
| Benedick | And do it with all thy heart. |
| Beatrice | I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest. |
| Benedick | Come, bid me do any thing for thee. |
| Beatrice | Kill Claudio!39 |
These last two words are a violent shock after Beatrice and Benedick’s love talk. ‘It’s audacious writing, but it is as life is’, says Meera Syal. ‘Life turns on a sixpence like that. It’s not neat, it’s jagged.’40 What Beatrice demands of Benedick, to murder his friend, is so immense, so outside morality, that he responds in a salvo of monosyllables. ‘Ha! Not for the wide world!’ For once, talkative Beatrice chokes. ‘You kill me to deny it. Farewell.’ Three times in quick succession she rages, ‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place!’ because ‘Sweet Hero! She is wronged, she is slandered, she is undone.’ As Benedick tries to interrupt, she explodes – ‘O that I were a man for his sake, or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake!...I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.’41
So when Benedick presses her, ‘Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?’ ‘Yea,’ she replies, ‘as sure as I have a thought, or soul.’42 Through loving Beatrice, Benedick learns at last to reject the blinkered misogyny of his male peer group and to trust women. Though he recoils from the ultimate demand to ‘Kill Claudio’, under persuasion he resolves, to Beatrice’s satisfaction, to challenge Claudio to a duel.
By the end of her play, Beatrice, like Rosalind at the beginning of hers, has inspired, and been inspired by the miracle of love. Love moves Beatrice the more deeply for its unexpectedness. And Benedick also convinces us that love has changed him. Like Rosalind, he cites Leander and Troilus as models of archetypal lovers with whom he amazedly compares himself, ‘why, they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love.’43 But outwardly Benedick still finds it hard to depart from his hard-to-get script, ‘I love thee against my will.’ When he asks, ‘Do not you love me?’ Beatrice replies, ‘Why, no; no more than reason.’44 Then with absolute parity, she lobs the same question back at him. ‘Do not you love me?’ He duplicates her reply, ‘Why, no; no more than reason.’45
A century later Millamant and her lover Mirabell enjoyed a similar battle of wits as the caustic couple in Congreve’s play The Way of the World:
| Millamant | I won’t be called names after I’m married; positively, I won’t be called names. |
| Mirabell | Names! |
| Millamant | Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar. I shall never bear that... Well, if Mirabell should not make a good husband, I am a lost thing, for I find I love him violently. |
| Mirabell | ...Well, heaven grant I love you not too well, that’s all my fear.46 |
Shakespeare and Congreve, both writers of great comedy, knew how violent desire can underlie the outward antagonism between razor sharp lovers like Millamant and Mirabell or Beatrice and Benedick. At the comic climax of Much Ado, mutual love is testified by public revelation of Beatrice and Benedick’s letters. ‘A miracle! Here’s our own hands against our hearts,’ concedes Benedick, ‘Come, I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity.’ Beatrice ripostes, ‘I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption’. With a kiss – their first – they proceed to marriage and Benedick saves face by asserting, ‘man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.’ Their love has been a fight that will continue into marriage and beyond. Rosalind’s courtship is about an education in which she learns as much as she teaches, as all thoughtful educators do. It’s a class in life-long learning. Much Ado ends, as Shakespeare’s comedies do, with a dance – but no epilogue. To Rosalind but not to Beatrice, Shakespeare awards the last word.
In 2014/15 the RSC paired Love’s Labour’s Lost with Much Ado About Nothing under a credibly alternative title, Love’s Labour’s Won. Michelle Terry played both Rosaline and Beatrice and Edward Bennett was both Berowne and Benedick. He thought, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost is like remembering being twenty-one – there is a fizz and energy to express, [while in] Much Ado there is a sense of wisdom, and a heaviness.’ Michelle Terry gave a star-making performance as Beatrice, navigating ‘the character’s acerbity, melancholy and romantic insecurity with a mastery far beyond even her accustomed brilliance.’47 She graduated to play an exhilarating Rosalind in Blanche McIntyre’s production at Shakespeare’s Globe during the summer of 2015. ‘In years to come those who saw her on stage, and saw McIntyre direct, will count themselves lucky. St Crispin’s Day for girls.’48