‘I’ll hold my mind were she an Ethiope’. He cares more about growing in Leonato’s estimations than marrying for love. Proof of this can be seen at the wedding where all the women are masked. He cannot even see who his bride is and asks, ‘Which is the lady I must seize upon’.
In my opinion, Shakespeare portrays Claudio as in love with the idea of being in love; he is presented as the stereotypical romantic lover and is in love with an image. In Act one, Scene one he has never even spoken to Hero, yet says ‘That I love her, I feel (line 203)’ and talks about her as if he feels very strongly for her (line 270):
‘But now I am returned, and that war-thoughts / have left their places vacant, in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires/ All prompting me how fair young Hero is’.
He speaks in blank verse and his language is poetic, reflecting the romanticism of Claudio. In Act two, Scene three, line 11, Benedick comments on how Claudio has changed since falling in love:
‘I have / known when there was no music with him but the drum / and the fife, and now had he rather hear the tabor and the / pipe’.
Shakespeare presents Claudio’s love for Hero as conditional; when Don John, a character renowned for being untrustworthy, informs Claudio of Hero’s unfaithfulness, he (Claudio) disgraces her at what is supposed to be her wedding without even speaking to her first. He loves her when she is everything he wants her to be, but when her perfect image is corrupted, his love evaporates. Claudio and Hero do not even speak deeply before the ceremony; they have no insight into each other’s characters; what is on the surface is all that is between them. They are presented as flat characters; much of the time Hero is silent and passive and Claudio is easily influenced and fickle. I think that Shakespeare presents them in this way to give the audience the message that romantic love is false love.
The presentation of Leonato’s love for Hero is similar to Claudio’s, in the way that it is conditional, but this is an example of paternal love as opposed to romantic love. Both Claudio and Leonato love Hero dearly when she is chaste, fair and modest, but when Claudio disgraces her, they both stop loving her. Both men use very extreme language to disgrace Hero. To Claudio she is a ‘rotten orange’ and to Leonato a rotting carcass (Act four, Scene one, line 138):
‘the wide sea/ Hath… / …salt too little which may season give / to her foul tainted flesh.’
Neither Claudio nor Leonato question the accusation that Don John has made; when Hero protests her innocence she is ignored and the word of the villain is taken. This is the dramatic climax of the play, when the comedy almost becomes a tragedy. The audience is shocked that two men who supposedly love the innocent Hero could treat her and speak to her in such a harsh manner. The contrast of Act four, Scene one with the comedy of Dogberry and Verges in the previous scene amplifies the audience’s shock. It is not until Benedick and the Friar, as men, convince Leonato that Hero is innocent that he is assured, and as soon as her image is restored he loves her again and the mood of the play is lifted slightly.
As a father and daughter’s reputation were inextricably linked in Elizabethan times he disowns Hero because by disgracing herself she has disgraced him. To Leonato, Hero’s loss of honour is an irremovable stain; an ineradicable humiliation which he cannot escape from (Act four, Scene one, line 37):
‘O she is fallen / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again’.
He would rather that his daughter were dead than alive and bringing shame upon him (Act four, Scene one, line 152):
‘Hence from her, let her die.’ Shakespeare presents Leonato’s love as dependant on Hero’s perfection and submission.
In stark contrast to Hero, Beatrice is anything but submissive. She is introduced to the audience in the first scene of the play and she dominates the conversation, interrupting the messenger and totally bewildering him with her witty wordplay, as in line 47, where the messenger comments on Benedick:
‘And a good soldier too, lady.’ Beatrice replies,
‘And a good soldier to a lady. But what is he to a lord?’ This is an example of the form of pun where a word is repeated to possess a different meaning. In Elizabethan times, it was extremely unusual and socially unacceptable for a woman to be so forthright as to interrupt a male conversation; Beatrice is non-conformist as opposed to Hero who represents society’s ideal, and an Elizabethan audience might have found her quite shocking. She is also independent and assertive, unlike Hero who is submissive and controlled by the men around her. These two women create a contrast, as do the two men from the pairs of lovers, Claudio and Benedick. Claudio is presented as the traditional romantic lover, and when Benedick falls in love with Beatrice he tries to be. In Act five, Scene two he makes a humorous attempt at rhyming and fails miserably:
(line 35) ‘I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby’ - / an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn’, ‘horn’ - a hard rhyme; for / ‘school’, ‘fool’ - a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings.’
Benedick is honest in his love for Beatrice; he uses prose as opposed to Claudio’s blank verse and refrains from verbosity. An example of this can be found in Act four, Scene one when he declares his love for her:
(line 264) ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you. / Is not that strange?’ This contrasts with Claudio’s ‘fantastical banquet’ of words. Beatrice also speaks in prose for the majority of the play, as opposed to Hero’s poetry and blank verse. Beatrice and Benedick’s prose could be a representation of the honest or true nature of their love.
It is obvious to the audience that Beatrice and Benedick are meant for each other, despite and because of the ‘merry war’ raging between them. Before Act 4, whenever the two characters meet they use their barbed wit and play on words relentlessly to deliver insults and jibes towards one another. For example, in Act 1, Scene 1, line 119, Benedick says:
‘God keep your ladyship still in that mind so / some gentleman or other shall ‘scape a predestinate / scratched face.’
In her retort, Beatrice echoes his words in ‘scratching’ and ‘face’ but uses them to insult him (line 121):
‘Scratching could not make it worse, an ‘twere / such a face as yours were.’
The animosity presented between them is just a facade to hide their affections for each other. Benedick wishes to do this because he is afraid of being cuckolded; he makes many references to cuckoldry. For example, when he discovers that Claudio plans to marry Hero (Act one, Scene one, line 176) he says:
‘In faith hath not the world / one man but he will wear his cap with suspicion?’
He does not trust women and believes that marriage will restrict his freedom, as is seen in Act one, Scene one when he speaks to Claudio about wedding Hero (line 179):
‘Thou wilt needs thrust thy neck into a yoke, wear the print / of it and sigh away Sundays.’ The animal imagery used to present this idea is interesting, as it is used throughout the play. Here Benedick links the life of a married man to the captive, tiresome life of a working bull. Don Pedro later says (Act one, Scene two, line 232), ‘In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke’, referring to Benedick and the fact that he will marry one day. Benedick’s response,
‘The savage bull may, but if ever the sensible / Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead’, is implicit of the symbol of a cuckold, thus reinforcing the existing evidence of his fear of cuckoldry.
Another example of animal imagery in the play is in Act three, Scene one, line 35, when Hero says:
‘I know her spirits are as coy and wild / As haggards of the rock.’ She is comparing Beatrice to a wild hawk that has been free for too long to be tamed.
There is evidence in Much Ado to suggest that Beatrice may be hiding her love for Benedick because he has hurt her before. This is revealed when she speaks of his heart in Act two, Scene one, line 250:
‘he lent it me awhile and I / gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one.’
She also disguises her love because she is a proud character and, like Benedick, refuses to entertain any ideas of marriage:
‘Would it not grieve a woman to be over- / mastered by a piece of valiant dust?’
Due to their similarities; their wit, their stance on love and marriage, their intelligence; it is clear to the audience that Beatrice and Benedick should be together. By appearing to hate each other, they are only fooling themselves.
When brought together by the trickery of their friends, they easily accept what they are hearing, implying that they want to believe it. During his soliloquy in Act 2, Scene 3, line 207, Benedick convinces himself that his friends are telling the truth:
‘This can be no trick. The / conference was sadly borne. They have the truth of this from / Hero.’
Shakespeare often presents the innermost thoughts and feelings of characters to his audience through soliloquy, for example, Lord Macbeth in Macbeth. In this example, the audience see Benedick renounce his pride, show his true feelings for Beatrice and justify his love.
Beatrice also accepts the word of her friends Hero and Ursula almost immediately. A parallel within Much Ado is that deception brings Benedick and Beatrice together; it tears Claudio and Hero apart.
Even though Claudio and Hero are the central love theme in the play, the audience is introduced to Beatrice and Benedick first, and their wit and character attract the interest of the audience away from the first two. Additionally, their love plot is more interesting; it is far from straightforward, as opposed to Claudio and Hero’s up until the wedding. Perhaps Shakespeare presents Beatrice and Benedick to appeal more to the audience because he believes that their true love, their love of each other’s personalities, is superior to romantic love.
The one remaining form of love presented exists between Claudio, Benedick and Don Pedro; this is platonic or brotherly love. Because they fought together they know each other well. This is evident between Benedick and Claudio in Act one, Scene one, line 148 when Benedick says:
‘Do you question me as an honest man should / do, for my simple true judgement? Or would you have / me speak after my custom’. This reveals that there are two sides to Benedick and Claudio knows them both. Benedick shows his love for Claudio in a dramatic moment in Act four, Scene one where Beatrice gives him the ultimatum, ‘Kill Claudio’. Although he eventually gives in to her, his first reply is:
‘Ha, not for the wide world.’ For a moment the love that Benedick has for Claudio is stronger than his true love for Beatrice.
There is a great deal of banter between the three men but none of it is taken to heart; this is further evidence that the men know each other well. An example of this can be seen in act one, scene one where the three characters are discussing Hero. Their teasing of each other is good-natured, as is the conspiracy between Claudio and Don Pedro behind Benedick’s back.
In conclusion, I think that Shakespeare’s presentation of love in the play reflects his beliefs and also society’s stereotypes. The fact that Beatrice and Benedick’s love is presented to be more attractive to the audience than Claudio and Hero’s could portray Shakespeare’s own opinion; true love between two independent personalities for their own contentment is far superior to the empty, superficial love emphasised between the two insubstantial characters of Claudio and Hero. His portrayal of love also reflects the expectations of Elizabethan society, in that women were expected to be passive and submissive, and be chaste and pure before marriage, and everyone was expected to marry. Even Benedick and Beatrice are made to obey convention in the end. I wonder though, why Shakespeare makes Beatrice conform? Perhaps it is because he knew that, realistically, she would never have been accepted in society and he wanted the play to resemble to reality, or maybe he is simply reacting to the conventions of his time.
