Thursday, April 19, 2007
On this Page
Much Ado About Nothing:
the language of Benedick and Beatrice
Romeo and Juliet:
the lead-up to the ball (see below)
Much Ado About Nothing
An examination of the ways in which Benedick and Beatrice play with language in order to insult each other during the first act of Much Ado About Nothing, together with an account of the function of the other characters in telling us more about the pair.
(This piece will be of particular interest to entrants for the AS English Literature and Language paper. It is crammed with key words from the syllabus, together with a wealth of footnotes.)
Benedick and Beatrice are arguably Shakespeare’s finest combative lovers, each needing a worthy target - which only the other can provide - for their wounding jests and savage put-downs. They exchange but thirty lines in the first act, yet these contain insults of such power and audacity that even as Beatrice is leaving the stage much of the audience will be longing, perhaps in horrified anticipation, for the next encounter.
When the play opens, we need some context within which to comprehend the couple’s resumption of their abusive “merry war”. In fact, the sketchy exposition (1) offered us through the mouths of Leonato and the messenger introduces themes and characters which, ostensibly, will be of greater significance to the unfolding drama: a battle won, Don Pedro, the victorious prince, on his way and Claudio, the seeming protagonist of this play, acclaimed as a valiant young warrior. The relationship between Benedick and Beatrice runs merely as a sub-plot (2) during the first three acts.
We are also alerted to the dominant style of the language: with 70% of its lines in prose, Much Ado About Nothing has the second smallest proportion of verse of any of Shakespeare’s works. Contrary to his normal custom, however, rather than assigning the prose sections merely to those of inferior status, the Bard allots it in full measure to his aristocrats. He alerts us to this subtly: after their initial exchange in prose, Leonato asks a question of the messenger in a rhythm which could be construed as a pentameter (3) of dactyls (4) a pyrrhic (5) and a trochee (6):
How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?
In his response - through which he makes clear the differing values put upon the higher and lower social strata - the messenger seems to take the Governor’s metre as a hint that they should establish the classic form of Elizabethan dramatic verse, the iambic pentameter (7):
But few of any sort, and none of name.
Leonato spurns this stylistic offer, redirecting their discourse into the realm of prose-based euphuism (8) where the nobility might polish their compliments and Benedick and Beatrice can hone their verbal sabres. Shakespeare was writing for an audience which loved adventurous wordplay, hungered for new expressions and had little time for pedantry. As Russ McDonald reminds us in The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, “the practices of sixteenth-century dramatic language were developed and refined by playwrights who were committed to the value of eloquence and thoroughly grounded in the study of rhetoric.” (a)
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare had put upon the stage a fourteen-year-old girl (played, as always, by a young male) who at her first sighting of a particular teenaged boy falls headlong into love. The dramatist grants Juliet the power to give voice to her inner feelings through the most beautiful and spirited verse he can conceive, a poetry which even the most educated and imaginative youngster could not come near to creating so eloquently. The simple actuality (9) of what such an adolescent might really say is rejected in favour of the deeper truths of what she would say had she the skill to give words to what is in her heart. However, although mere prose would have concealed the workings of Juliet’s soul, we cannot listen to her poetry without overhearing the scratching pen of the dramatist: Shakespeare’s Cyrano within Juliet’s Christian de Neuvillette (10).
Consequently, one appeal of Much Ado as a project may have been that it gave Shakespeare an opportunity to create a female character able to deploy all the resources that renaissance (or “early modern”) rhetoric (11) could offer, since her very reason for living appeared to be rooted in an urge to argue. Perhaps having had his taste for the termagant whetted by his (largely verse) adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare may have been drawn to the concept of a spirited woman who could seemingly give voice to his wit extemporarily (12). While few in real life can talk as fluidly and inventively as Beatrice, such an individual is conceivable. However, in order for us to believe that she is making up the words as she goes along, she has to speak in prose.
For someone who professes the utmost distain for Benedick, it is telling that with her first line Beatrice asks how he has fared in the battle. Strikingly, she coins a name for him derived from an up-thrusting move in the comparatively safe art of fencing, “montanto”, both to belittle his valour and to hint scornfully at his supposed sexual promiscuity. This play was written during a pre-Darwinian (13) time when the physical expression of desire, though frequently carried out, was despised by the high-born as bestial; the declared ideal love being in the intellectual bonding of souls. Hero knows full well to whom her cousin is referring, thereby indicating to the audience that the relationship between the contrary pair is already firmly established – though the only employment Beatrice herself will give to her adversary’s name before he appears is in punning it with the notion of demonic possession. The messenger remains steadfast in his reporting of Benedick’s brave conduct, yet Beatrice is determined to scorn her absent companion as conquering only in contests against the Goddess of Love’s little archer, Cupid. Underlying the multiple connotations (14) of the phonological (15) forms she uses – such as “flight” to mean “archery contest” or “flyte” to mean “contest of insults” – is the audience’s awareness that the bow and arrow is not a fitting weapon for a lord. With one of the shifts of meaning which become her trade mark, she suggests that if Benedick has knocked down any creature, it will be no more than a bird, because her claim,
I promised to eat all of his killing
implies not a conversion to cannibalism but rather a belief that he will have slain nobody in the battle.
Most of the males among the family and guests at Messina aspire to be masters of the high-flown language, replete with figurative conceits (16), artful variations of syntax (17) and wilful twistings of meaning which was labelled in that period as “euphuism”. In her introduction to the Arden edition of the text (b), Claire McEachern argues that this verbal style “is the means by which members of this group signal their membership in the group, and their relations to each other”. Beatrice’s talent with this masculine art signals her independence from the intellectual restraints placed on females within her uncle’s household, her self-confident idiolect (18) thus distinguishing her starkly from her reticent cousin. When the messenger commends Benedick with:
And a good soldier too, lady.
she wrests from him the lexical item “too”, meaning “also”, and returns it to him as a preposition within a sentence which is almost phonologically identical, but for the insertion of the smallest English determiner (19). By this transformation she claims not only superior knowledge of Benedick’s supposed rough approach to women but also the ownership of the language:
And a good soldier to a lady.
After her implication that Benedick would not receive respect from another of his status: “but what is he to a lord?” the messenger’s stout defence merely gives her ammunition for another insult, as she turns his complement (20) “stuffed”, meaning “well stocked” into an insulting pre-modifier (21) to the noun “man” thereby implying that Benedick has been fattened either with food or with straw.
The plot demands that we should learn of the new friendship between Benedick and Claudio. Our knowledge, almost inevitably, comes via Beatrice’s character assassination, made in front of the messenger. Although it is not clear that the messenger is a man of lesser rank – for all address him as “you”, signalling that he is not a servant – he cannot be regarded as an intimate. After conjuring up for him an image of Benedick as possessing little of that faculty – reason – which separates humankind from the beasts, she asserts that the absent warrior is inconstant in his friendships:
He hath every month a new sworn brother.
From any less perverse a character we would interpret this as a slander. To Shakespeare’s audience, the taking of oaths was a serious matter while brotherhood was regarded as one of the most sacred of relationships - but Beatrice makes light of both before segueing past the figurative burning of her books into her prophecy that Benedick will send Claudio mad: “He is sooner caught than the pestilence.” This passage will stand out as ironical in the light of Claudio’s later caddish behaviour and Benedick’s contrasting reliability. Leonato’s rebuke to her is mild in the extreme, reflecting an uncle’s indulgence for a niece whom he hopes will not be taken too seriously. We are to discover Beatrice’s escape clause after the banquet scene, when she demurs from Don Pedro’s talk of marriage:
pardon me, I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
Within moments of the arrival of the company of high-born war returnees, the play’s dominant theme of the fear of cuckoldry is introduced. Perhaps uncertain in this risky game of euphuism where a simple “yes” or “no” might betray a man’s dullness, Leonato’s over-fastidious acknowledgement that he believes himself to be Hero’s father:
Her mother hath many times told me so
solicits an impudent interrogative (22) from Benedick:
Were you in doubt, sir?
upon which Leonato confirms Benedick’s reputation for licentiousness. This interchange, though superficially clothed in a style of flowery repartee, is shot through with a deep unease. Don Pedro attempts a rescue, only to be thwarted by Benedick’s clumsy attempt to praise Hero which, with its conditional “if” prolonging the questioning of Hero’s paternity and a seeming reference to the Governor’s aged appearance, succeeds only in insulting Leonato further.
If this moment is played for its awkwardness, the brutality of Beatrice’s rude declarative (23) interjection:
I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick; nobody marks you.
may be no stronger than what is required to shift the focus. All attention is diverted towards the spectacle of two intelligent people indulging in seemingly hurtful badinage, battering each other with the resilience of seasoned verbal warriors who never acknowledge pain. Muriel Bradbrook asserts that “Benedick and Beatrice are flirting from the beginning” (c), but theirs is a flirtation of a deeply idiosyncratic kind. Benedick seizes a quality in his adversary he sees as central and personifies it with a sarcastically gallant interrogative:
What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?
Beatrice welcomes his insult as ammunition which, for her attack, she can reshape into a rhetorical question posing as a philosophical truism (24): figuratively, her disdain can feed upon Benedick’s inadequacies. They then embark on a series of complex sentences (25) in a bid to outwit each other. Because their dialogue is designed to sound naturalistic, they cannot resort to the easy poetical devices of alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhyme; simile is rejected in favour of the personifications “Disdain” and “Courtesy” plus the use of the stative verb (26), as in: “you are a rare parrot-teacher”
To a 21st Century reader, the couple’s lexis seems replete with archaisms (27) but lexemes such as “turncoat”, “pernicious” and “parrot” may have appeared in the language as late as the 16th Century. The Oxford English Dictionary (d) notes that Benedick’s employment of the abstract noun “continuer” in connection with horses is the first recorded use of that sense: while it may not strictly qualify as a neologism (28), it might be a new extension of meaning. Theirs is a freshly-minted language for a forward-looking society.
When Benedick admits to being desired by many women while refusing to give any love in return, Beatrice’s puts him down with the crude antithesis (29):
I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.
Beatrice claims she prefers the sound of animals screeching to the voice of a man declaring his love.
Benedick’s appeal to his god that she should not change her mind might be seen as his first small retreat in this skirmish of wits; his professed sympathy for those of his own gender who would otherwise be at risk from her leads to the doubling of pre-modifiers “predestinate scratched” and immediately into the bathetic near-admission that he is protective of his own looks. Beatrice has bullied him down from humorist to straight man, by converting every one of his assaults into a choice feed line. As Castiglione (e) writes, witticisms are very elegant “which depend on turning someone’s own sarcastic remarks against him.” The euphuistic approach frowns upon straightforward abuse such as “you are ugly”, but by following her observation about an apparently generalised third person, “Scratching could not make it worse,” with the particularised second person conditional, “an ‘twere such a face as yours were,” Beatrice can in effect say the same but more prettily. Benedick manages only the weary complement “you are a rare parrot-teacher”, which Beatrice easily caps with a further antithesis, this time exulting “bird” above “beast”.
With his imperative (30) utterance “But keep your way,” followed by the mildly blasphemous “o’God’s name”, Benedick churlishly concedes victory to Beatrice, who has shown herself able to keep the jests coming and to build on each of his sallies. His comparison of her stamina to that of a horse is an ungallant and unfunny way out, but she does not allow him to escape without pursuing the equine metaphor in turn: he is a “jade” or unreliable mount which ducks out of obstacles and unseats its rider. The connotation here is that she has been riding him so successfully he can escape her only by ignoble means.
The device of bringing in Don Pedro at this point, supposedly after completing his tête-à-tête with Leonato, is perhaps the one clumsily-staged moment of the scene. Learning that the guests will stay one month, we anticipate that a story will unfold in the location. The main plot of Claudio’s desire for Hero must advance, while the playwright needs to retain Benedick on stage so that he can enlarge upon his cautious attitude towards women and his fear of cuckoldry; Beatrice must leave with no more dialogue to utter. The relationship of the pair of accomplished wordsmiths having been established, we await the next encounter.
Refs.
(a) Russ McDonald: The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare
(Bedford Books 1996)
(b) Claire McEachern: Introduction to Much Ado About Nothing
(The Arden Shakespeare 2006)
(c) Muriel C Bradbrook: Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry
(Chatto and Windus 1951)
(d) The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OUP 1987)
(e) Baldassare Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier (1528:
translated from the Italian by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1560)
(1) Exposition: See Revision Express A-Level Study Guide (REAL) page 98.
(2) Sub-plot: See REAL page 99.
(3) Pentameter: a line of verse consisting of five “feet”.
This can be defined loosely as “a verse line with five stresses”.
(Academics call them “accents”, but “stresses” will serve).
See REAL page 62 for (3) – (7).
(4) Dactyl: a foot consisting of one stressed syllable, followed by two
unstressed syllables. ˉ ˇ ˇ
(5) Pyrrhic: a foot consisting of two unstressed syllables. ˇ ˇ
(6) Trochee: a foot consisting of one stressed syllable, followed by one
unstressed syllable. ˉ ˇ
ˉ ˇ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˇ ˇ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˇ ˉ ˇ
How many ׀ gentlemen ׀ have you ׀ lost in this ׀ action?
dactyl dactyl pyrrhic dactyl trochee
(7) Iambic pentameter: An “iamb” is a foot consisting of one unstressed and one
stressed syllable ˇ ˉ
Therefore, an “iambic pentameter” is a verse line containing
five of these:
ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ
But few ׀ of an ׀ y sort, ׀ and none ׀ of name.
iamb iamb iamb iamb iamb
(8) Euphuism: A late 16th/ early 17th Century style of conversation (or writing) which prized an ornate, polished, almost flowery, cleverness of expression. Euphuism uses a wealth of rhetorical (see 11) devices, elaborate comparisons and far-fetched metaphors. Practitioners like to take another’s lexemes and transform their meaning.
The word is derived from two influential novels written by John Lyly: Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580).
(9) Actuality: What really happens; reality.
(10) Cyrano: In the French play Cyrano de Bergerac written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano is an accomplished soldier and poet who loves Roxane. However, because he thinks of himself as ugly (with a very large nose) he dares not declare his love. Instead, he teams up with a handsome young soldier, Christian de Neuvillette, who also loves Roxane but is rather simple-minded. In some very funny but touching scenes, Cyrano feeds Christian with all the words he needs to persuade Roxane to fall in love. She is enraptured by Cyrano’s words, but because they come through the voice of Christian, they cause her (not surprisingly) to fall in love with the younger man.
(11) Rhetoric: the art of persuasion through eloquent speech.
See REAL page 122.
(12) Extemporarily: on the spur of the moment; doing or saying something
spontaneously without thinking about it beforehand.
(13) Darwin: After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), many people began to think of the act of procreation as a biological imperative which led to a natural and desirable impulse.
Renaissance thinkers had tried to establish the ways in which humans could be distinguished from God’s other creatures – including separating intellectual and spiritual matters from bodily functions - whereas Darwin’s studies led many people to think that humans are just another type of animal.
(14) Connotation: See REAL pages 6, 85.
(15) Phonological: See REAL pages 14, 125.
(16) Conceit: An intricate or far-fetched metaphor, which functions through a
juxtaposition of ideas arousing feelings of shock, surprise or
amusement. See REAL page 50.
(17) Syntax: See REAL pages 10, 124.
(18) Idiolect: See REAL pages 16, 105.
(19) Determiner: See REAL page 5. The smallest English determiner is “a”.
(20) Complement: See REAL page 11.
(21) Pre-modifier: See REAL page 10.
(22) Interrogative: See REAL page 12.
(23) Declarative: See REAL page 12.
(24) Truism: A statement so obviously true that it does not need discussing.
(25) Complex sentence: See REAL pages 12, 124.
(26) Stative verb: See REAL page 4 (verbs: line 3)
(27) Archaism: See REAL pages 59, 124.
(28) Neologism: See REAL page 59.
(29) Antithesis: A contrasting of two ideas made sharp by the use of words of opposite or conspicuously different meaning in contiguous clauses (i.e. clauses put one after the other). dog/bark/crow v. man/swear/love See REAL pages 38, 123.
(30) Imperative sentence: See REAL page 12.
(My recommendation of this book is not connected to any commercial advantage
Professor Pentameter)
(This piece will be of particular interest to entrants for the AS English Literature and Language paper. It is crammed with key words from the syllabus, together with a wealth of footnotes.)
Benedick and Beatrice are arguably Shakespeare’s finest combative lovers, each needing a worthy target - which only the other can provide - for their wounding jests and savage put-downs. They exchange but thirty lines in the first act, yet these contain insults of such power and audacity that even as Beatrice is leaving the stage much of the audience will be longing, perhaps in horrified anticipation, for the next encounter.
When the play opens, we need some context within which to comprehend the couple’s resumption of their abusive “merry war”. In fact, the sketchy exposition (1) offered us through the mouths of Leonato and the messenger introduces themes and characters which, ostensibly, will be of greater significance to the unfolding drama: a battle won, Don Pedro, the victorious prince, on his way and Claudio, the seeming protagonist of this play, acclaimed as a valiant young warrior. The relationship between Benedick and Beatrice runs merely as a sub-plot (2) during the first three acts.
We are also alerted to the dominant style of the language: with 70% of its lines in prose, Much Ado About Nothing has the second smallest proportion of verse of any of Shakespeare’s works. Contrary to his normal custom, however, rather than assigning the prose sections merely to those of inferior status, the Bard allots it in full measure to his aristocrats. He alerts us to this subtly: after their initial exchange in prose, Leonato asks a question of the messenger in a rhythm which could be construed as a pentameter (3) of dactyls (4) a pyrrhic (5) and a trochee (6):
How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?
In his response - through which he makes clear the differing values put upon the higher and lower social strata - the messenger seems to take the Governor’s metre as a hint that they should establish the classic form of Elizabethan dramatic verse, the iambic pentameter (7):
But few of any sort, and none of name.
Leonato spurns this stylistic offer, redirecting their discourse into the realm of prose-based euphuism (8) where the nobility might polish their compliments and Benedick and Beatrice can hone their verbal sabres. Shakespeare was writing for an audience which loved adventurous wordplay, hungered for new expressions and had little time for pedantry. As Russ McDonald reminds us in The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, “the practices of sixteenth-century dramatic language were developed and refined by playwrights who were committed to the value of eloquence and thoroughly grounded in the study of rhetoric.” (a)
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare had put upon the stage a fourteen-year-old girl (played, as always, by a young male) who at her first sighting of a particular teenaged boy falls headlong into love. The dramatist grants Juliet the power to give voice to her inner feelings through the most beautiful and spirited verse he can conceive, a poetry which even the most educated and imaginative youngster could not come near to creating so eloquently. The simple actuality (9) of what such an adolescent might really say is rejected in favour of the deeper truths of what she would say had she the skill to give words to what is in her heart. However, although mere prose would have concealed the workings of Juliet’s soul, we cannot listen to her poetry without overhearing the scratching pen of the dramatist: Shakespeare’s Cyrano within Juliet’s Christian de Neuvillette (10).
Consequently, one appeal of Much Ado as a project may have been that it gave Shakespeare an opportunity to create a female character able to deploy all the resources that renaissance (or “early modern”) rhetoric (11) could offer, since her very reason for living appeared to be rooted in an urge to argue. Perhaps having had his taste for the termagant whetted by his (largely verse) adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare may have been drawn to the concept of a spirited woman who could seemingly give voice to his wit extemporarily (12). While few in real life can talk as fluidly and inventively as Beatrice, such an individual is conceivable. However, in order for us to believe that she is making up the words as she goes along, she has to speak in prose.
For someone who professes the utmost distain for Benedick, it is telling that with her first line Beatrice asks how he has fared in the battle. Strikingly, she coins a name for him derived from an up-thrusting move in the comparatively safe art of fencing, “montanto”, both to belittle his valour and to hint scornfully at his supposed sexual promiscuity. This play was written during a pre-Darwinian (13) time when the physical expression of desire, though frequently carried out, was despised by the high-born as bestial; the declared ideal love being in the intellectual bonding of souls. Hero knows full well to whom her cousin is referring, thereby indicating to the audience that the relationship between the contrary pair is already firmly established – though the only employment Beatrice herself will give to her adversary’s name before he appears is in punning it with the notion of demonic possession. The messenger remains steadfast in his reporting of Benedick’s brave conduct, yet Beatrice is determined to scorn her absent companion as conquering only in contests against the Goddess of Love’s little archer, Cupid. Underlying the multiple connotations (14) of the phonological (15) forms she uses – such as “flight” to mean “archery contest” or “flyte” to mean “contest of insults” – is the audience’s awareness that the bow and arrow is not a fitting weapon for a lord. With one of the shifts of meaning which become her trade mark, she suggests that if Benedick has knocked down any creature, it will be no more than a bird, because her claim,
I promised to eat all of his killing
implies not a conversion to cannibalism but rather a belief that he will have slain nobody in the battle.
Most of the males among the family and guests at Messina aspire to be masters of the high-flown language, replete with figurative conceits (16), artful variations of syntax (17) and wilful twistings of meaning which was labelled in that period as “euphuism”. In her introduction to the Arden edition of the text (b), Claire McEachern argues that this verbal style “is the means by which members of this group signal their membership in the group, and their relations to each other”. Beatrice’s talent with this masculine art signals her independence from the intellectual restraints placed on females within her uncle’s household, her self-confident idiolect (18) thus distinguishing her starkly from her reticent cousin. When the messenger commends Benedick with:
And a good soldier too, lady.
she wrests from him the lexical item “too”, meaning “also”, and returns it to him as a preposition within a sentence which is almost phonologically identical, but for the insertion of the smallest English determiner (19). By this transformation she claims not only superior knowledge of Benedick’s supposed rough approach to women but also the ownership of the language:
And a good soldier to a lady.
After her implication that Benedick would not receive respect from another of his status: “but what is he to a lord?” the messenger’s stout defence merely gives her ammunition for another insult, as she turns his complement (20) “stuffed”, meaning “well stocked” into an insulting pre-modifier (21) to the noun “man” thereby implying that Benedick has been fattened either with food or with straw.
The plot demands that we should learn of the new friendship between Benedick and Claudio. Our knowledge, almost inevitably, comes via Beatrice’s character assassination, made in front of the messenger. Although it is not clear that the messenger is a man of lesser rank – for all address him as “you”, signalling that he is not a servant – he cannot be regarded as an intimate. After conjuring up for him an image of Benedick as possessing little of that faculty – reason – which separates humankind from the beasts, she asserts that the absent warrior is inconstant in his friendships:
He hath every month a new sworn brother.
From any less perverse a character we would interpret this as a slander. To Shakespeare’s audience, the taking of oaths was a serious matter while brotherhood was regarded as one of the most sacred of relationships - but Beatrice makes light of both before segueing past the figurative burning of her books into her prophecy that Benedick will send Claudio mad: “He is sooner caught than the pestilence.” This passage will stand out as ironical in the light of Claudio’s later caddish behaviour and Benedick’s contrasting reliability. Leonato’s rebuke to her is mild in the extreme, reflecting an uncle’s indulgence for a niece whom he hopes will not be taken too seriously. We are to discover Beatrice’s escape clause after the banquet scene, when she demurs from Don Pedro’s talk of marriage:
pardon me, I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
Within moments of the arrival of the company of high-born war returnees, the play’s dominant theme of the fear of cuckoldry is introduced. Perhaps uncertain in this risky game of euphuism where a simple “yes” or “no” might betray a man’s dullness, Leonato’s over-fastidious acknowledgement that he believes himself to be Hero’s father:
Her mother hath many times told me so
solicits an impudent interrogative (22) from Benedick:
Were you in doubt, sir?
upon which Leonato confirms Benedick’s reputation for licentiousness. This interchange, though superficially clothed in a style of flowery repartee, is shot through with a deep unease. Don Pedro attempts a rescue, only to be thwarted by Benedick’s clumsy attempt to praise Hero which, with its conditional “if” prolonging the questioning of Hero’s paternity and a seeming reference to the Governor’s aged appearance, succeeds only in insulting Leonato further.
If this moment is played for its awkwardness, the brutality of Beatrice’s rude declarative (23) interjection:
I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick; nobody marks you.
may be no stronger than what is required to shift the focus. All attention is diverted towards the spectacle of two intelligent people indulging in seemingly hurtful badinage, battering each other with the resilience of seasoned verbal warriors who never acknowledge pain. Muriel Bradbrook asserts that “Benedick and Beatrice are flirting from the beginning” (c), but theirs is a flirtation of a deeply idiosyncratic kind. Benedick seizes a quality in his adversary he sees as central and personifies it with a sarcastically gallant interrogative:
What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?
Beatrice welcomes his insult as ammunition which, for her attack, she can reshape into a rhetorical question posing as a philosophical truism (24): figuratively, her disdain can feed upon Benedick’s inadequacies. They then embark on a series of complex sentences (25) in a bid to outwit each other. Because their dialogue is designed to sound naturalistic, they cannot resort to the easy poetical devices of alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhyme; simile is rejected in favour of the personifications “Disdain” and “Courtesy” plus the use of the stative verb (26), as in: “you are a rare parrot-teacher”
To a 21st Century reader, the couple’s lexis seems replete with archaisms (27) but lexemes such as “turncoat”, “pernicious” and “parrot” may have appeared in the language as late as the 16th Century. The Oxford English Dictionary (d) notes that Benedick’s employment of the abstract noun “continuer” in connection with horses is the first recorded use of that sense: while it may not strictly qualify as a neologism (28), it might be a new extension of meaning. Theirs is a freshly-minted language for a forward-looking society.
When Benedick admits to being desired by many women while refusing to give any love in return, Beatrice’s puts him down with the crude antithesis (29):
I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.
Beatrice claims she prefers the sound of animals screeching to the voice of a man declaring his love.
Benedick’s appeal to his god that she should not change her mind might be seen as his first small retreat in this skirmish of wits; his professed sympathy for those of his own gender who would otherwise be at risk from her leads to the doubling of pre-modifiers “predestinate scratched” and immediately into the bathetic near-admission that he is protective of his own looks. Beatrice has bullied him down from humorist to straight man, by converting every one of his assaults into a choice feed line. As Castiglione (e) writes, witticisms are very elegant “which depend on turning someone’s own sarcastic remarks against him.” The euphuistic approach frowns upon straightforward abuse such as “you are ugly”, but by following her observation about an apparently generalised third person, “Scratching could not make it worse,” with the particularised second person conditional, “an ‘twere such a face as yours were,” Beatrice can in effect say the same but more prettily. Benedick manages only the weary complement “you are a rare parrot-teacher”, which Beatrice easily caps with a further antithesis, this time exulting “bird” above “beast”.
With his imperative (30) utterance “But keep your way,” followed by the mildly blasphemous “o’God’s name”, Benedick churlishly concedes victory to Beatrice, who has shown herself able to keep the jests coming and to build on each of his sallies. His comparison of her stamina to that of a horse is an ungallant and unfunny way out, but she does not allow him to escape without pursuing the equine metaphor in turn: he is a “jade” or unreliable mount which ducks out of obstacles and unseats its rider. The connotation here is that she has been riding him so successfully he can escape her only by ignoble means.
The device of bringing in Don Pedro at this point, supposedly after completing his tête-à-tête with Leonato, is perhaps the one clumsily-staged moment of the scene. Learning that the guests will stay one month, we anticipate that a story will unfold in the location. The main plot of Claudio’s desire for Hero must advance, while the playwright needs to retain Benedick on stage so that he can enlarge upon his cautious attitude towards women and his fear of cuckoldry; Beatrice must leave with no more dialogue to utter. The relationship of the pair of accomplished wordsmiths having been established, we await the next encounter.
Refs.
(a) Russ McDonald: The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare
(Bedford Books 1996)
(b) Claire McEachern: Introduction to Much Ado About Nothing
(The Arden Shakespeare 2006)
(c) Muriel C Bradbrook: Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry
(Chatto and Windus 1951)
(d) The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OUP 1987)
(e) Baldassare Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier (1528:
translated from the Italian by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1560)
(1) Exposition: See Revision Express A-Level Study Guide (REAL) page 98.
(2) Sub-plot: See REAL page 99.
(3) Pentameter: a line of verse consisting of five “feet”.
This can be defined loosely as “a verse line with five stresses”.
(Academics call them “accents”, but “stresses” will serve).
See REAL page 62 for (3) – (7).
(4) Dactyl: a foot consisting of one stressed syllable, followed by two
unstressed syllables. ˉ ˇ ˇ
(5) Pyrrhic: a foot consisting of two unstressed syllables. ˇ ˇ
(6) Trochee: a foot consisting of one stressed syllable, followed by one
unstressed syllable. ˉ ˇ
ˉ ˇ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˇ ˇ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˇ ˉ ˇ
How many ׀ gentlemen ׀ have you ׀ lost in this ׀ action?
dactyl dactyl pyrrhic dactyl trochee
(7) Iambic pentameter: An “iamb” is a foot consisting of one unstressed and one
stressed syllable ˇ ˉ
Therefore, an “iambic pentameter” is a verse line containing
five of these:
ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ ˇ ˉ
But few ׀ of an ׀ y sort, ׀ and none ׀ of name.
iamb iamb iamb iamb iamb
(8) Euphuism: A late 16th/ early 17th Century style of conversation (or writing) which prized an ornate, polished, almost flowery, cleverness of expression. Euphuism uses a wealth of rhetorical (see 11) devices, elaborate comparisons and far-fetched metaphors. Practitioners like to take another’s lexemes and transform their meaning.
The word is derived from two influential novels written by John Lyly: Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580).
(9) Actuality: What really happens; reality.
(10) Cyrano: In the French play Cyrano de Bergerac written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano is an accomplished soldier and poet who loves Roxane. However, because he thinks of himself as ugly (with a very large nose) he dares not declare his love. Instead, he teams up with a handsome young soldier, Christian de Neuvillette, who also loves Roxane but is rather simple-minded. In some very funny but touching scenes, Cyrano feeds Christian with all the words he needs to persuade Roxane to fall in love. She is enraptured by Cyrano’s words, but because they come through the voice of Christian, they cause her (not surprisingly) to fall in love with the younger man.
(11) Rhetoric: the art of persuasion through eloquent speech.
See REAL page 122.
(12) Extemporarily: on the spur of the moment; doing or saying something
spontaneously without thinking about it beforehand.
(13) Darwin: After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), many people began to think of the act of procreation as a biological imperative which led to a natural and desirable impulse.
Renaissance thinkers had tried to establish the ways in which humans could be distinguished from God’s other creatures – including separating intellectual and spiritual matters from bodily functions - whereas Darwin’s studies led many people to think that humans are just another type of animal.
(14) Connotation: See REAL pages 6, 85.
(15) Phonological: See REAL pages 14, 125.
(16) Conceit: An intricate or far-fetched metaphor, which functions through a
juxtaposition of ideas arousing feelings of shock, surprise or
amusement. See REAL page 50.
(17) Syntax: See REAL pages 10, 124.
(18) Idiolect: See REAL pages 16, 105.
(19) Determiner: See REAL page 5. The smallest English determiner is “a”.
(20) Complement: See REAL page 11.
(21) Pre-modifier: See REAL page 10.
(22) Interrogative: See REAL page 12.
(23) Declarative: See REAL page 12.
(24) Truism: A statement so obviously true that it does not need discussing.
(25) Complex sentence: See REAL pages 12, 124.
(26) Stative verb: See REAL page 4 (verbs: line 3)
(27) Archaism: See REAL pages 59, 124.
(28) Neologism: See REAL page 59.
(29) Antithesis: A contrasting of two ideas made sharp by the use of words of opposite or conspicuously different meaning in contiguous clauses (i.e. clauses put one after the other). dog/bark/crow v. man/swear/love See REAL pages 38, 123.
(30) Imperative sentence: See REAL page 12.
(My recommendation of this book is not connected to any commercial advantage
Professor Pentameter)
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Romeo and Juliet - the Opening
GCSE reduces city’s tragedy to love-at-first-sight party
Were you asked to study Act 1 Scene 5 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet for GCSE?
Did your teacher tell you not to bother reading the previous four scenes?
One of the consequences of the GCSE approach is that many sensitive and hard-working students never get an insight into the workings of drama because they are directed to studying cherry-picked scenes in isolation. With no sense of what is driving the various characters, students are limited to their own, contemporary, interpretations of how the relationship between Romeo and Juliet begins and develops. The playwright’s economical and arresting presentation of the dynamic of the city, with its trigger-happy young men, its egocentric family heads, its exasperated citizens and its frustrated ruler, remains a blank to them.
wise teachers
Many teachers understand the importance of the scenes which build up to the climax of Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting. If you are a student of one such wise teacher, you may lose little by clicking onto another website right now.
Shakespeare did not make up this story
The story of Romeo and Juliet had become well established before the Shakespearian play was written.
Stories with similar themes (or “analogues”) can be traced back to ancient Greece, while a version which corresponds in very many details to Shakespeare’s play was published as early as 1476 in a novella set in Siena by the Italian writer Masuccio Salernitano. In 1530, another Italian, Luigi da Porto, published a version of the legend set in Verona, naming the feuding families “Montecchi” and “Capelletti,” and developing the psychological interest of the story
In 1554, the story was further developed by Bandello then translated with elaborations into French. Eventually, in 1562, Arthur Brooke produced a 3020-line poem in English rhyming hexameters based mainly on these two works.
transforming a sad tale into tragic drama
Academics debate even today whether the author of the Shakespearian plays could read the main Italian dialects of his time; that he did read Brooke’s poem there is no doubt.
For a young playwright to take on such a well-known tale was an act of some courage; by triumphing with it artistically he proved that he had true dramatic skill.
When we compare the earlier works with the play we now know, we can see where Shakespeare has invented completely new scenes, turned sketchy characters into convincing psychological portraits and brazenly thrust his own imagery-rich poetry into the mouths of adolescents. He has tightened and reworked the plot, teases us cunningly with his theme of misinterpreted and lost messages and makes us so involved with the fortunes of his lovers that even when we know the story inside out we ache with hope that, maybe this time, Romeo will delay long enough to see Juliet awaken.
right from the start, we know they’re going to die
In the version of the script published in 1599 (the “Second Quarto”), which most editors take as the most authoritative, a fourteen-line prologue in sonnet form tells us that it was through the suicides of a “pair of star-cross’d lovers” that a feud between two Veronese households was brought to an end.
Although this prologue did not feature in the collected plays published in 1623 after Shakespeare’s death (the “Folio”), we must assume it was normally used to herald each stage production.
If we, the audience, are told before a play begins that its central characters will die, the purpose of acting it out and of watching it must be more than to find the answer to “Will they? Won’t they?” The lovers’ passion may draw us in while the twists and turns of the plot will keep us on edge, but somehow the drama must engage us at a deeper level. In the Shakespearian tragedies, it is frequently the environment in which the characters find themselves which is somehow not right. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet serves as a come-on which promises us not merely a wringing-out of our emotions, but an experience through which we might come to understand something about the resolution of discord in our own lives.
don’t ignore Shakespeare’s first scenes
Shakespeare’s version opens with a completely new invention: two fairly low-status men of the Capulet household, Sampson and Gregory, who will not feature much in the unfolding of the plot.
They seem like comics with their puns about fighting and sex, but through their attitudes Shakespeare is already directing our attention towards the fuel for so many of the disturbances of his time and of ours: the energy of self-regarding young males whose identity is entirely shaped by the group which accepts them and the group which they despise. Sampson’s boast is that he will beat Montague’s men and seduce Montague’s women.
As any attempt to act the scene will soon reveal, the sequence of the insulting gesture of thumb-biting is a powerful demonstration on stage of what has been dubbed by some “disrespek” or “dissing.” The audience is immediately caught up by the genuineness of the quarrel: these two scallywags are depressingly recognisable.
The playwright is too canny to allow the fight to get far. He wants to bring in Benvolio (whose name literally means “well-wishing”) as peacemaker so we can sense there is variety in the attitudes towards conflict held by the various young men. With his “you know not what you do,” Benvolio echoes a familiar line from the biblical Jesus, but his attempt to stop the fight by drawing his sword is misinterpreted by Tybalt, who has just turned up.
gang-fights on the streets of Verona
Idle young men hanging around in the typical Italian city state would generally not take long to turn up at the scene of trouble, if trouble was what they were looking for. Very quickly, we get a picture of Tybalt’s passion for violence:
“What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word,
As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee”
As soon as he has established Tybalt’s venom, Shakespeare needs to stop the fight, and to effect this has the genius to bring in an important factor in the city: the citizens. He knows he cannot afford to develop any citizens as characters during the unfolding of the lovers’ story, but by introducing them here he tells us that the strife between the two families is most definitely not popular:
“Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!”
everyone but the lovers within 79 lines
The citizens having been established, the argument escalates with the arrival of the top Capulet couple. In just two lines, the husband is established as combative while his wife shows herself as his mocker. Next, the Montagues, husband and wife, appear and the two “old” men threaten each other.
How can mayhem be stopped without losing dramatic authenticity? Surely the playwright has set up a situation in which wholesale slaughter must ensue or the audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief” will fail.
Shakespeare has been holding back a trump card. He did not invent a prince to rule over this city; he did not even make up the prince’s name of Escalus. He found that in his sources.
What he does invent is this escalating scene of conflict stopped by the timely intervention of the chief authority, Prince Escalus. The play is only 78 lines in, yet the politics of the whole city and its principal individuals have been revealed to us already through this edgy, breathtaking scene. When Escalus issues his edict forbidding the two families to disturb the peace again on pain of death, he is setting up the consequences which will follow upon Romeo’s later killing of Tybalt.
Romeo the lover
We have not yet seen either Romeo or Juliet. Romeo's mother eventually refers to him:
“O where is Romeo, saw you him today?
Right glad I am he was not at this fray.”
By keeping him absent from the brawl, Shakespeare gives us the sense that his heart is not in fighting. There is some bitter irony in this, because by the end of the play Romeo has brought about more deaths than any other character.
We learn from Romeo's parents that he has been melancholy, and then from the young man himself that he is in love. Shakespeare was following Brooke’s poem in this, but he must have felt that Romeo’s lengthy complaint about how he adores his lady but she rejects him is important to an understanding of his character.
The name of the young woman Romeo loves is Rosaline.
What is the significance of this? Surely the bard is telling us that Romeo is prone to falling in love. Adolescent love is usually quickly entered and intense. Young men can be lovesick, unable to sleep, to carry out normal tasks or to think of anything but the loved one.
But young love can very easily fade away; passion can turn into disdain; one beauty can be usurped by another.
the changeable heart
When Romeo while on the lookout for Rosaline first meets Juliet, all feelings for his former love are abandoned.
The action of Shakespeare’s tragedy is completed within a few days, when both lie dead. Could we not read as an implied subtext that this infatuation with Juliet may itself have become a passing phase? Without the pressure from the parents, the aggression of the youths, the bringing forward of Paris’ wedding date, the meetings held in secret and the meddling of the friar, might the relationship not have run its course and fizzled out?
Shakespeare reduced Juliet’s age to 14, which as her father reminds Paris at their first meeting is young for marriage. The dramatist in him could not resist creating for her a nurse of extreme vulgarity. The image onstage of an innocent girl (played by a young boy) acting opposite such a brutish female figure would surely increase the sense of her vulnerability. Every one of those who should be caring for and guiding her fails properly to discharge that duty. It is no wonder that she is swept up by the passion of a romantic youth.
more GCSE: Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet to come
Were you asked to study Act 1 Scene 5 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet for GCSE?
Did your teacher tell you not to bother reading the previous four scenes?
One of the consequences of the GCSE approach is that many sensitive and hard-working students never get an insight into the workings of drama because they are directed to studying cherry-picked scenes in isolation. With no sense of what is driving the various characters, students are limited to their own, contemporary, interpretations of how the relationship between Romeo and Juliet begins and develops. The playwright’s economical and arresting presentation of the dynamic of the city, with its trigger-happy young men, its egocentric family heads, its exasperated citizens and its frustrated ruler, remains a blank to them.
wise teachers
Many teachers understand the importance of the scenes which build up to the climax of Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting. If you are a student of one such wise teacher, you may lose little by clicking onto another website right now.
Shakespeare did not make up this story
The story of Romeo and Juliet had become well established before the Shakespearian play was written.
Stories with similar themes (or “analogues”) can be traced back to ancient Greece, while a version which corresponds in very many details to Shakespeare’s play was published as early as 1476 in a novella set in Siena by the Italian writer Masuccio Salernitano. In 1530, another Italian, Luigi da Porto, published a version of the legend set in Verona, naming the feuding families “Montecchi” and “Capelletti,” and developing the psychological interest of the story
In 1554, the story was further developed by Bandello then translated with elaborations into French. Eventually, in 1562, Arthur Brooke produced a 3020-line poem in English rhyming hexameters based mainly on these two works.
transforming a sad tale into tragic drama
Academics debate even today whether the author of the Shakespearian plays could read the main Italian dialects of his time; that he did read Brooke’s poem there is no doubt.
For a young playwright to take on such a well-known tale was an act of some courage; by triumphing with it artistically he proved that he had true dramatic skill.
When we compare the earlier works with the play we now know, we can see where Shakespeare has invented completely new scenes, turned sketchy characters into convincing psychological portraits and brazenly thrust his own imagery-rich poetry into the mouths of adolescents. He has tightened and reworked the plot, teases us cunningly with his theme of misinterpreted and lost messages and makes us so involved with the fortunes of his lovers that even when we know the story inside out we ache with hope that, maybe this time, Romeo will delay long enough to see Juliet awaken.
right from the start, we know they’re going to die
In the version of the script published in 1599 (the “Second Quarto”), which most editors take as the most authoritative, a fourteen-line prologue in sonnet form tells us that it was through the suicides of a “pair of star-cross’d lovers” that a feud between two Veronese households was brought to an end.
Although this prologue did not feature in the collected plays published in 1623 after Shakespeare’s death (the “Folio”), we must assume it was normally used to herald each stage production.
If we, the audience, are told before a play begins that its central characters will die, the purpose of acting it out and of watching it must be more than to find the answer to “Will they? Won’t they?” The lovers’ passion may draw us in while the twists and turns of the plot will keep us on edge, but somehow the drama must engage us at a deeper level. In the Shakespearian tragedies, it is frequently the environment in which the characters find themselves which is somehow not right. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet serves as a come-on which promises us not merely a wringing-out of our emotions, but an experience through which we might come to understand something about the resolution of discord in our own lives.
don’t ignore Shakespeare’s first scenes
Shakespeare’s version opens with a completely new invention: two fairly low-status men of the Capulet household, Sampson and Gregory, who will not feature much in the unfolding of the plot.
They seem like comics with their puns about fighting and sex, but through their attitudes Shakespeare is already directing our attention towards the fuel for so many of the disturbances of his time and of ours: the energy of self-regarding young males whose identity is entirely shaped by the group which accepts them and the group which they despise. Sampson’s boast is that he will beat Montague’s men and seduce Montague’s women.
As any attempt to act the scene will soon reveal, the sequence of the insulting gesture of thumb-biting is a powerful demonstration on stage of what has been dubbed by some “disrespek” or “dissing.” The audience is immediately caught up by the genuineness of the quarrel: these two scallywags are depressingly recognisable.
The playwright is too canny to allow the fight to get far. He wants to bring in Benvolio (whose name literally means “well-wishing”) as peacemaker so we can sense there is variety in the attitudes towards conflict held by the various young men. With his “you know not what you do,” Benvolio echoes a familiar line from the biblical Jesus, but his attempt to stop the fight by drawing his sword is misinterpreted by Tybalt, who has just turned up.
gang-fights on the streets of Verona
Idle young men hanging around in the typical Italian city state would generally not take long to turn up at the scene of trouble, if trouble was what they were looking for. Very quickly, we get a picture of Tybalt’s passion for violence:
“What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word,
As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee”
As soon as he has established Tybalt’s venom, Shakespeare needs to stop the fight, and to effect this has the genius to bring in an important factor in the city: the citizens. He knows he cannot afford to develop any citizens as characters during the unfolding of the lovers’ story, but by introducing them here he tells us that the strife between the two families is most definitely not popular:
“Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!”
everyone but the lovers within 79 lines
The citizens having been established, the argument escalates with the arrival of the top Capulet couple. In just two lines, the husband is established as combative while his wife shows herself as his mocker. Next, the Montagues, husband and wife, appear and the two “old” men threaten each other.
How can mayhem be stopped without losing dramatic authenticity? Surely the playwright has set up a situation in which wholesale slaughter must ensue or the audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief” will fail.
Shakespeare has been holding back a trump card. He did not invent a prince to rule over this city; he did not even make up the prince’s name of Escalus. He found that in his sources.
What he does invent is this escalating scene of conflict stopped by the timely intervention of the chief authority, Prince Escalus. The play is only 78 lines in, yet the politics of the whole city and its principal individuals have been revealed to us already through this edgy, breathtaking scene. When Escalus issues his edict forbidding the two families to disturb the peace again on pain of death, he is setting up the consequences which will follow upon Romeo’s later killing of Tybalt.
Romeo the lover
We have not yet seen either Romeo or Juliet. Romeo's mother eventually refers to him:
“O where is Romeo, saw you him today?
Right glad I am he was not at this fray.”
By keeping him absent from the brawl, Shakespeare gives us the sense that his heart is not in fighting. There is some bitter irony in this, because by the end of the play Romeo has brought about more deaths than any other character.
We learn from Romeo's parents that he has been melancholy, and then from the young man himself that he is in love. Shakespeare was following Brooke’s poem in this, but he must have felt that Romeo’s lengthy complaint about how he adores his lady but she rejects him is important to an understanding of his character.
The name of the young woman Romeo loves is Rosaline.
What is the significance of this? Surely the bard is telling us that Romeo is prone to falling in love. Adolescent love is usually quickly entered and intense. Young men can be lovesick, unable to sleep, to carry out normal tasks or to think of anything but the loved one.
But young love can very easily fade away; passion can turn into disdain; one beauty can be usurped by another.
the changeable heart
When Romeo while on the lookout for Rosaline first meets Juliet, all feelings for his former love are abandoned.
The action of Shakespeare’s tragedy is completed within a few days, when both lie dead. Could we not read as an implied subtext that this infatuation with Juliet may itself have become a passing phase? Without the pressure from the parents, the aggression of the youths, the bringing forward of Paris’ wedding date, the meetings held in secret and the meddling of the friar, might the relationship not have run its course and fizzled out?
Shakespeare reduced Juliet’s age to 14, which as her father reminds Paris at their first meeting is young for marriage. The dramatist in him could not resist creating for her a nurse of extreme vulgarity. The image onstage of an innocent girl (played by a young boy) acting opposite such a brutish female figure would surely increase the sense of her vulnerability. Every one of those who should be caring for and guiding her fails properly to discharge that duty. It is no wonder that she is swept up by the passion of a romantic youth.
more GCSE: Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet to come
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