The Officers’ Code

The beginning of the play, then, presents, in a social context, a company of young bloods, headed by the noble Don Pedro, who all hold together with a cheerful masculine solidarity.  The ‘sworn brothers’ are companions-in-arms, and if one deserts, there is cause for lamentation:  ‘I have known when he would have walked ten mile afoot to see a good armour, and now will he lie ten nights awake carving the fashion of a new doublet’.   If Claudio dramatically distrusts Don Pedro at first— 

      ‘Let every eye negotiate for itself,
      And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch
     Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.’

  then the discovery of his mistake only strengthens his later trust in, and solidarity with, Don Pedro; and this trust is implicit even in the terms of his first doubt, which still postulates a male world of ‘negotiation’ and ‘agents’, against the hypnotic and possibly devilish enemy, Woman.  Claudio’s world, and Claudio’s plot, are never ‘reformed’—in a dramatic, or moral sense—because they neither can nor need be changed; the simple course of loving, mistaking, and winning again, written from a specifically masculine point of view (again using the word masculine in its idiosyncratic sense here) that is half romance and half business, is a necessary backbone to the play, and holds the comedy together.                                --Barbara Everett, 1961

  It is a truism that criticism should be concerned with what a work of art is, and not with what it ought to be.  In the case of Much Ado, however, it is one worth remembering, for preconceptions about form, plot, and character, and the other components of a play, have so often obscured what is unmistakably there, and shows itself in the very first scene of the play: the precise delineation of an aristocratic and metropolitan society.  This is done with a thoroughness and depth which is beyond any requirement of a romantic fable in the tradition of Ariosto and Bandello, and beyond the demands of a plot merely intended to exhibit the characters of Beatrice, Benedick, Dogberry, and Verges, in the way that Coleridge suggested.
      The opening scene of the play establishes for us the characteristic tone of Messina society.  Don John’s rebellion has been successfully put down and the victors are returning to Messina with their newly-won honors.  It is significant that, in spite of the fact that Don John still exists to cause trouble, there is no serious discussion of the reasons for or consequences of the rebellion.  War is regarded as something that might deprive society of some of its leading lights—Leonato asks the messenger ‘How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?’—and enhance the status of others.  The messenger informs us that no gentlemen ‘of name’ have been lost, and Claudio and Benedick have fought valiantly and achieved honor.  War is a gentlemanly pursuit, a game of fortune—nothing more. --John Crick, 1965   

  Men and women have a notably different character, different mode of thinking different system of loyalties, and, particularly, different social place and function.  Not only this; but this is the first play, I think, in which the clash of these two worlds is treated with a degree of seriousness, and in which the woman’s world dominates.  --Barbara Everett, 1961

It is here (in the church scene) that the social abnormality of aristocratic society in Messina is exposed once and for all for what it is—shallow and perverse application of a standard of behavior that is both automatic and uncharitable.  In part, critical misunderstanding of this scene has sprung from failure to realize that the deception by Don John and Borachio of Claudio and Don Pedro into the belief that Hero is sexually loose is symbolic as well as psychological.  Inability to see clearly at night is a common human trait but in Claudio and Don Pedro it symbolizes the dominant trait of aristocratic folk in Messina, in whom failure of physical eyesight is equivalent to moral confusion.   Those who marry according to the philosophy of caveat emptor, like Claudio, are bound to be predisposed to sexual distrust, while their depreciation of love and marriage to the level of the marketplace inevitably leads them to believe in virginity as the principal attribute of a bride-to-be.   --Walter N. King, 1964

  The reader must not run away with the idea that matrimony is at all encouraged in the cavalry, or, indeed, in any branch of the service; very far from it.  It is recognized that human frailty is such that some allowance must be made for senior officers, but the married subaltern is not likely to find himself popular, and unless a very good chap, may receive a strong hint to remove himself and his bride to another regiment.  The chief reason for this feeling against matrimony is that it is bad for the mess.    --Captain W. E. Cairnes, 1908  

  Into this world, at the beginning of the play, come the warriors, covered with masculine honors, cheerful with victory, and heralded importantly by a messenger. They even bring their own style of figured public rhetoric with them:  ‘He hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion . . .’  ‘The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it . . .’  ‘I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace; and it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any . . .’ The ‘most exquisite Claudio’, the ‘proper squire’, is the flower of such a world; the plot that concerns him, and that seems at first to dominate the play, can be seen as the survival of all that is most formal, and least flexible, in the earlier comedies: a masculine game of romantic love with a firm—and sensible—business basis, the whole governed by an admirable sense of priorities in duty:

‘I look’d upon her with a soldier’s eye
But now I am return’d and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Came thronging soft and delicate desire,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying I lik’d her ere I went to wars.’ 
                                             --Barbara Everett, 1961  

  But Claudio is no worse than those who, knowing Hero better than he, take at face value the ‘fact’ of her depravity.  In twenty-three impassioned lines dripping with the sentimentality and bombast an unexamined moral code can produce, Leonato sermonizes on the theme ‘Why ever was thou lovely in my eyes?’ (IV. i. 121-144). ‘Let her die,’ he urges (IV. i. 155), and insists, ‘She not denies it’ (IV. i. 174), in the face of Hero’s flat declaration to Claudio, ‘I talked with no man at that hour, my lord’ (IV. i. 87). Leonato’s allegiance to a dessicated social norm continues even after Friar Francis outlines a means for retrieving Hero’s reputation.  As hyperbolic as Claudio, Leonato also illustrates the truth of Beatrice’s summary estimate of the male world of Messina: ‘But manhood is melted into courtesies, valor into compliments, and men are turned into tongues, and trim ones too.  He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie, and swears it’ (IV. i. 20-24).  No longer fooled by words, she longs to be a man in a society in which the traditional concept of manhood has become debased.                                           --Walter N. King, 1964