**This post is Part 2 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**

The Performance:

I had the good fortune of watching the Robert Delamere and Josie Rourke production of this play, featuring Catherine Tate and David Tennant as Beatrice and Benedick. It may be that Digital Theatre, like the Criterion Collection, is one of the few net positives to come out of the streaming era.

Despite featuring modern dress and props, the production was very faithful to the original, with minimal cuts to the dialogue. As far as I can tell, the only character modification of substance was casting Anna Farnworth as Innogen, Leonato’s wife, whose character took the place of Antonio, Leonato’s brother. Especially to a modern reader/viewer, their dialogue makes much more sense as a married couple than as a father and uncle of Hero.

One of the more well-noted aspects of this play is that it really is all about Beatrice and Benedick. Despite Claudio and Hero’s love being the “main” plot, the play is nothing without the wit, the ambiguity, and the philosophical depth of the on-and-off love between Beatrice and Benedick. All of these attributes are rendered beautifully by Tate and Tennant: the characters are laugh-out-loud funny, contagiously enraptured by one another, and yet maintain a certain ironic distance from the love displayed by the other couples in the play. I’ll come back to this crucial latter point in subsequent sections.

The Play:

Much Ado is easy to read but hard to discern. Whatever the moral of the play is (if there is one), it can certainly be found in the comparison of the two relationships, those between Hero and Claudio on one hand and Beatrice and Benedick on the other. With the help of Claude AI, I’ve created the below table comparing and contrasting the two relationships.

Aspect	Claudio & Hero	Benedick & Beatrice
Foundation	Sight-based, immediate attraction	History of verbal sparring, shared experience
Development	Static, idealized; disrupted by external circumstances	Dynamic, evolving; grows through dialogue
Social Context	Conventional courtship through patriarch	Subversive of social norms, direct communication
Crisis Response	Claudio immediately believes the worst, publicly shames Hero	Benedick trusts Beatrice’s judgment, challenges social consensus
Language	Formal, ritualized, often speaking through others	Witty, direct, innovative, personal
Power Dynamics	Claudio holds social power; Hero is passive	More egalitarian; mutual vulnerability
Identity	Characters maintain fixed social roles	Characters transform through relationship
Test of Love	Failed (Claudio abandons Hero without proper investigation)	Passed (Benedick chooses Beatrice over male friendship)
Symbolic Scene	Public shaming at the altar	Private oath to “kill Claudio” for Beatrice
Nature of Resolution	Ritual atonement, substitution, forgiveness	Mutual surrender of pride, acknowledgment of love
Dramatic Function	Represents social convention, potential tragedy	Represents authentic connection, comic transcendence
View of Marriage	Economic, political arrangement	Intellectual and emotional connection
Dramatic Arc	Begins idealized, becomes problematic	Begins problematic, becomes idealized

As readers, our clear preference for Beatrice and Benedick seems to be driven by two major reasons: 1) the characters themselves are rounder, wittier, and occupy a sort of cynical high ground above the passions of the other characters; and 2) the plot between them simply makes more sense.

I’m left wondering how much better the “love” between Claudio and Hero would have been understood in Shakespeare’s day, when the customs around honor and marriage–and indeed the idea of romantic love–were quite different. Certainly Claudio’s outrage at his supposed disgrace would have been more understandable, but was the public shaming at the altar not an overreaction even by historical standards? Similarly, Claudio appears to us too eager to accept Leonato’s forgiveness and his offer to marry his niece. While such arrangements would have been customary, I’m tempted to suggest that it is these very customs Shakespeare seeks to lampoon through the play.

Beatrice and Benedick’s love seems more genuine to us because it grows without the reinforcement of social pressures–and, in fact, despite them. The play seems to hold their love up to us as more dynamic, more authentic, and indeed less vulnerable to challenges as simple as hearsay, which seem to wreak havoc on the love of Claudio and Hero. Yet, one cannot forget that they were manipulated by the others into confessing their love, and so a seed of contingency and social dependency is planted which cannot be so easily dismissed. With Benedick’s final words to Beatrice—”Peace! I will stop your mouth”—he simultaneously silences and kisses her, suggesting their verbal battles will continue even in marriage.

So let the reader beware: I’m not sure that Shakespeare is creating, in Beatrice and Benedick, a new model for love. In transcending the social conventions and the gossip, Beatrice and Benedick also seem to have outgrown the idea of love that is never–to my mind–satisfactorily redeemed, despite their ending up together. They seem to be making a different kind of pledge to one another–a more mature, authentic one to be sure, but one that carries an awareness of its contingency.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway in Much Ado regards the power of language. Its powers to amuse, deceive, seduce, and justify all move the plot more than any other force, natural or human. We are, it seems, free to be who we choose to be. But why we would choose to be one thing more than another–that, the play suggests, might be less in our control than we think. It is in this ironic tension that the play’s moral work is done, and it is done exceedingly well.

The Bloom:

Bloom seems to take my reading of Beatrice and Benedick’s love a step further. To Bloom, their love is not true love any more than Claudio’s and Hero’s. In fact, there is no true love in Much Ado on Bloom’s reading. The triumph of Beatrice and Benedick, he argues, is that they know this dark truth. He refers to the play as “certainly the most amiably nihilistic play ever written” (Bloom, 193), and he sees Beatrice and Benedick as the vanguards of this nihilism.

I’m not willing to bite that bullet as hard as Bloom, but I think he is right in identifying the “exuberance and cognitive power” (Bloom, 192), as well as the “ambivalence of […] will” (Bloom, 196) of Beatrice–and, to a lesser extent, Benedick–as the most enchanting facet of the play, one that overrides and subjugates concerns about the quality of their love.

And yet, Bloom comes out more hopeful about the future of Beatrice and Benedick’s romance than I’m inclined to be.

What binds and will hold Beatrice and Benedick together is their mutual knowledge and acceptance of this benign nihilism. – Bloom, 200

While I certainly agree with the present tense of this sentence (and let’s be clear–the representation of such in a credible way is an unbelievable feat of literature), I can’t endorse the future tense. The problem with nihilism is that it, well, nihilates. I don’t think the takeaway of the play is: have a love like Beatrice and Benedick, and it will last forever. Bloom seems aware but uninterested in this point:

Perhaps there is just a hint that like most Shakespeare marriages, the union of Beatrice and Benedick may not be a bower of bliss. In this comedy, more than ever, that does not matter. – Bloom, 201

For that, I give him a lot of credit. Much Ado About Nothing is philosophically interesting, but it is mostly funny, entertaining, and alive. Especially in this case, that seems good enough.

Rating: 8/10