Content area
Full Text
INTERPRETERS of Much Ado about Nothing have often remarked that Shakespeare focuses in this middle comedy upon the faculty of hearing. And indeed "noting,' in its senses of listening and eavesdropping, does much to complicate and unravel the play's fable.' What is rarely noted in accounts of Much Ado is the dependence of hearing upon speaking, the possibility that Shakespeare may also dramatize the potential of speech to exasperate and resolve humankind's wishes and schemes, especially as they involve romantic love. Repeatedly the language of Much Ado illustrates the fact that expression often becomes disjoined from meaning. "The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments [trimmed with odds and ends],' Benedick tells jesting Don Pedro, "and the guards are but slightly basted on neither" (1.1.265-66).2 Anne Barton takes Benedick's quip to mean that "the trimmings" of Don Pedro's speech "are very insecurely stitched on too (i.e. they have little connection with what is being said)."3 A. P Rossiter has remarked that in Much Ado Cupid does not work by slander, but by hearsay "Of this matter / Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made," Hero pronounces, "That only wounds by hearsay" (3.1.21-23). The word has two parts. In Much Ado, "[Dove by hearsay,' according to Rene Girard, "means love by another's voice."5 Love arises when stratagems of eavesdropping make Benedick, Beatrice, and Claudio fall either in or out of love, but they do so only because of what other characters say, only because of the speech uttered and the attitude of members of the trio toward it. One would assume that a gap of some kind naturally exists between Beatrice's, Benedick's, and Claudio's original selfgenerated (in some cases faint) amorous inclinations and the romantic love created by others' speech and the speech of lovers molded by their utterances. It is another version of the disjunction between inward meaning and spoken words that we hear in Benedick's quip about the "slightly basted" rhetorical "trimmings" of Don Pedro's speech.
At stake in these examples is what we are accustomed to call the truth. Shakespeare unforgettably invites the question of the relation of spoken language to the truth by showing how easily the words of others cause Benedick and Beatrice to fall in and out of love....