How would you direct the character of Hero in “Much ado about nothing” in three of their key scenes including how these scenes fit into the play as a whole? Focus on how you would get the character to deliver their lines and how their language contrasts with other characters.
In this essay I will be looking at the character Hero. I will write about how she interacts with other characters, her personality and her function within the play. The three scenes I will be looking at are Act 3 scene 1, Act 3 scene 4 and Act 5 scene 4.
If I was directing Act 3 Scene 1, I would want Hero to come across to the audience as having a terrible secret that see just cannot keep and needs to tell somebody, because then Beatrice will think it is a secret and not a plan to get her and Benedick together. I would show this by making her seem shady, like looking around her all the time and being very aware of what’s going on around her. Hero wants her cousin to be happy and she knows that Benedick is the person to make her happy. Telling her gentlewomen that Benedick loves Beatrice is her secret and it just so happens that Beatrice overhears, because it was all planned that she should overhear. In this scene Hero is dominant in the conversation and says whole paragraphs instead of a few words that she says sporadically throughout the play, like in Act 1 scene 1 where she only says one line in the whole scene, “My cousin means Signor Benedick of Padua.” Page 5, line 27.This is because she needs Beatrice to overhear what she has to say then maybe finally Beatrice will admit she loves Benedick to. As I said before that Hero doesn’t say a lot, so when she does Beatrice takes notice because its so out of character. I feel this scene is important because it is where Beatrice finds out that Benedick loves her and without her knowing she wouldn’t be able to marry him at the end.
