A major difference I noticed was between the two actual love relationships of Hero and Beatrice. Hero and Claudio are a very romantic and passionate couple, love in the usual sense, as far as plays are concerned. Whereas Benedick and Beatrice’s relationship is much like two fires that burn less bright as they come together, as opposed to burn more brightly. This is accentuated in the line "Taming my wild heart to your loving hand", it is as if being in love with Benedick is calming Beatrice down, taming her wild and loud side. With Hero we are seeing the opposite to this, up until act 4.
The character of Beatrice is comparable, loosely, to that of a feminist. She is fiery and does not believe in all the models of women put upon her by society, especially the idea of marriage.
“LEONATO: (to Beatrice) well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband
BEATRICE: Not till God make men of some other metal than earth… Adam’s sons are my brethren, and, truly, I hold it a sin to match a kindred”
Beatrice believed she should not marry. Men are not what she wants; she prefers them as friends. This is the kind of view that women should or could not express in Elizabethan times, when a woman’s role was almost solely to be a wife.
Claudio describes Hero as a jewel, and in appearance she is fair, young, short, and dark-haired. Benedick describes her as fair in all aspects, and in Elizabethan times this would not have been a bad thing. Fairness, especially in skin, was something women were supposed to be striving for. The fact, as well, that Beatrice describes herself as sunburnt is a way to emphasise, once again, their differences. It also emphasises the fact that Hero is supposed to be a fairly typical female and Beatrice is supposed to be an extraordinary one.
Hero’s view on marriage is never expressed by herself, she is too much of a model Elizabethan women to express such views; it is, instead, expressed by her cousin Beatrice.
“Yes, faith; 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”
This quote not only shows us Hero’s view on marriage it also shows us some other differences between Hero and Beatrice. First being that Beatrice has no problem being sarcastic towards Hero, and also that Hero is shy of her own character. Antonio poses the question at Hero yet Beatrice replies.
We also can see that Beatrice wishes Hero to sometimes stick up for herself, the evidence being the last line of the quote, she wants Hero to say what she wants and stop being shy of her own opinions. This is also true in the opposite sense as regards Beatrice, many people find her nature far too loud and vibrant sometimes, and find her wit to be very rude.
Both the cousins are ‘bedfellows’ which to me shows both their huge friendship and also that they each know a great deal about each other. Beatrice’s love for Hero is exemplified when she asks Benedick to kill Claudio because he has wronged Hero; this is a huge amount of pressure to put on Benedick’s shoulders. It shows us again how passionate Beatrice is, she does what she believes is right no matter what.
Hero’s only exclamation of some kind of a love for Beatrice is with the trick she, Ursula and Margaret play that eventually makes Benedick fall in love with Beatrice. She says that she " I will do any modest office to help [Beatrice] to a good husband”. During the trick, she does as much to instruct Beatrice in her deficiencies as she mocks her to deceive Beatrice about Benedick.
This whole part of the play can be summed up by one line spoken by Hero:
“If it prove so, then loving goes by haps;
some cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”
This small rhyming couplet is the most confident thing that Hero says all through the play, and it is one of the most important things that is said throughout the entire play.
I think that Hero is correct in what she says here, and the ‘trap’ works in the end, which illustrates what she said. However what she says is also apparent in her own dilemma in the final act of the play where she has been disregarded as a whore, almost like love can be made and broken by traps. So it seems like what Hero has to say is very important to the themes of the play, she is the ‘emotional’ character, and Shakespeare uses her to get across the emotional themes of the play.
Beatrice’s wit is exceedingly clever, especially when used against the formidable foe of Benedick. Every character in the play seems to understand her skill with wit, except Benedick, and this is a reason they constantly squabble. It seems as though Beatrice is a character that strives to win in contests of intelligence and wit, which is of course opposite to what Hero’s character is. Hero’s character seems to shy away from all kinds of confrontation, and at the end it seems this is because she does not need to, all the people around her will fight for her no matter what.
Shakespeare has created two opposite cousins, characters whose emotions and ideas carry most of the play along. Their differences and similarities help them becoming friends and eventually wives, and at the end of the play we get the idea that they will forever be friends. Hero’s shy and timid nature has become a little more forward and confident; she is growing up as the play continues. By the end, although she has learnt a great deal about the world, she is still just a spoilt child, who needs not speak or act because those around will do it for her.
With the help of ‘cupid’s traps’, Beatrice’s witty enemy Benedick has broken her hard and independent shell. She has lost her anger at being an ‘old maid’ which made her so fiery and overly witty at the beginning of the play, it has been replaced by a more ‘tamed heart’, but her passion never leaves her. She is, by the end of the play, more than just the mature young woman she was, I feel she has turned full circle and become her own ideal woman.
