Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Ideal of Social Grace
The characters’ dense, colorful manner of speaking represents
the ideal that Renaissance courtiers strove for in their social
interactions. The play’s language is heavily laden with metaphor
and ornamented by rhetoric. Benedick, Claudio, and Don Pedro all
produce the kind of witty banter that courtiers used to attract
attention and approval in noble households. Courtiers were expected
to speak in highly contrived language but to make their clever performances seem
effortless. The most famous model for this kind of behavior
is Baldassare Castiglione’s sixteenth-century manual The
Courtier, translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561.
According to this work, the ideal courtier masks his effort and
appears to project elegance and natural grace by means of what Castiglione
calls sprezzatura, the illusion of effortlessness.
Benedick and his companions try to display their polished social
graces both in their behavior and in their speech.
The play pokes fun at the fanciful language of love that
courtiers used. When Claudio falls in love, he tries to be the perfect
courtier by using intricate language. As Benedick notes: “His words
are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes” (II.iii.18–19). Although
the young gallants in the play seem casual in their displays of
wit, they constantly struggle to maintain their social positions. Benedick
and Claudio must constantly strive to remain in Don Pedro’s favor.
When Claudio silently agrees to let Don Pedro take his place to
woo Hero, it is quite possible that he does so not because he is
too shy to woo the woman himself, but because he must accede to
Don Pedro’s authority in order to stay in Don Pedro’s good favor. When
Claudio believes that Don Pedro has deceived him and wooed Hero
not for Claudio but for himself, he cannot drop his polite civility,
even though he is full of despair. Beatrice jokes that Claudio is “civil
as an orange,” punning on the Seville orange, a bitter fruit (II.i.256).
Claudio remains polite and nearly silent even though he is upset,
telling Benedick of Don Pedro and Hero: “I wish him joy of her”
(II.i.170). Clearly, Claudio chooses his
obedience to Don Pedro over his love for Hero.
Claudio displays social grace, but his strict adherence
to social propriety eventually leads him into a trap. He abandons
Hero at the wedding because Don John leads him to believe that she
is unchaste (marriage to an unchaste woman would be socially unacceptable). But
Don John’s plan to unseat Claudio does not succeed, of course, as
Claudio remains Don Pedro’s favorite, and it is Hero who has to suffer
until her good reputation is restored.
Deception as a Means to an End
The plot of Much Ado About Nothing is
based upon deliberate deceptions, some malevolent and others benign.
The duping of Claudio and Don Pedro results in Hero’s disgrace,
while the ruse of her death prepares the way for her redemption
and reconciliation with Claudio. In a more lighthearted vein, Beatrice
and Benedick are fooled into thinking that each loves the other,
and they actually do fall in love as a result. Much Ado
About Nothing shows that deceit is not inherently evil,
but something that can be used as a means to good or bad ends.
In the play, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish
between good and bad deception. When Claudio announces his desire
to woo Hero, Don Pedro takes it upon himself to woo her for Claudio. Then,
at the instigation of Don John, Claudio begins to mistrust Don Pedro,
thinking he has been deceived. Just as the play’s audience comes
to believe, temporarily, in the illusions of the theater, so the
play’s characters become caught up in the illusions that they help to
create for one another. Benedick and Beatrice flirt caustically
at the masked ball, each possibly aware of the other’s presence
yet pretending not to know the person hiding behind the mask. Likewise, when
Claudio has shamed and rejected Hero, Leonato and his household
“publish” that Hero has died in order to punish Claudio for his
mistake. When Claudio returns, penitent, to accept the hand of Leonato’s
“niece” (actually Hero), a group of masked women enters and Claudio
must wed blindly. The masking of Hero and the other women reveals
that the social institution of marriage has little to do with love.
When Claudio flounders and asks, “Which is the lady I must seize
upon?” he is ready and willing to commit the rest of his life to
one of a group of unknowns (V.iv.53). His
willingness stems not only from his guilt about slandering an innocent
woman but also from the fact that he may care more about rising
in Leonato’s favor than in marrying for love. In the end, deceit
is neither purely positive nor purely negative: it is a means to
an end, a way to create an illusion that helps one succeed socially.
The Importance of Honor
The aborted wedding ceremony, in which Claudio rejects
Hero, accusing her of infidelity and violated chastity and publicly
shaming her in front of her father, is the climax of the play. In
Shakespeare’s time, a woman’s honor was based upon her virginity
and chaste behavior. For a woman to lose her honor by having sexual
relations before marriage meant that she would lose all social standing,
a disaster from which she could never recover. Moreover, this loss
of honor would poison the woman’s whole family. Thus, when Leonato
rashly believes Claudio’s shaming of Hero at the wedding ceremony,
he tries to obliterate her entirely: “Hence from her, let her die”
(IV.i.153). Furthermore, he speaks of her
loss of honor as an indelible stain from which he cannot distance
himself, no matter how hard he tries: “O she is fallen / Into a
pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean
again” (IV.i.138–140). For women in that
era, the loss of honor was a form of annihilation.
