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The Nurse is best remembered for her tedious, teasing report to Juliet about her projected marriage to Romeo. The Nurse is exhausted from all of her running around on Juliet’s behalf, but she can’t seem to give the anxious Juliet a straight answer: “Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous—Where is your mother?” (2.5.56–58). Juliet is beside herself with anticipation; she obviously doesn’t know how to deal with the Nurse’s nonsequiturs:
Where is my mother? Why, she is within.
Where should she be? How oddly thou repliest!
“Your love says, like an honest gentleman,
‘Where is your mother?’” (2.5.59–62)
This makes for lively dialogue, but the Nurse, before she delivers her message, can only complain about her “aching bones” (2.5.64). The Nurse is well-meaning but practical. When she learns of Romeo’s exile, she gives Juliet what she thinks is very good advice: “Your first [Romeo] is dead—or ‘twere as good he were / As living here and you no use of him” (3.5.226–27). The vulgar “use of him” is not an expression Juliet would ever utter. She is obviously not in the same world of discourse as the Nurse, and she resolves “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.244).
I would like to look at one other character in Shakespeare, Constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, although there are many other servants and persons of the lower class who are equally ungrammatical and probably illiterate. In act 3, scene 3, Dogberry asks the First Watch: “who think you the most desartless man to be constable?” and he replies, “Hugh Oatcake, sir, or George Seacole, for they can write and read” (3.3.9–12). Presumably, Hugh Oatcake and George Seacole have unusual qualifications that are denied to Dogberry himself. He is an earnest speaker, but he has great difficulties with the English language, especially in the matter of diction. He often uses words that mean the opposite of what he thinks; for example, his “desartless” for “deserving.” In act 3, scene 5, he has the memorable line “Comparisons are odorous” (3.5.16), which offers a wonderful alternative to the proverbial “comparisons are odious.” Leonato’s impatience with Dogberry and his companions is evident: “Neighbors, you are tedious” (3.5.18). The incomparable Dogberry, however, takes this as a compliment: “It pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor Duke’s officers; but truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find in my heart to bestow it all of your worship” (3.5.19–22). Why the “poor” duke? We will never find out. Leonato is astounded and doesn’t know what to say to the innocent Dogberry: “All thy tediousness on me, ah?” (3.5.23).
Despite their difficulties with the English language, Dogberry and his companions manage to apprehend Don John’s villains, Conrade and Borachio, although they don’t know exactly what to do with them. Conrade has only contempt for Dogberry: “You are an ass, you are an ass” (4.2.74), but Dogberry has an invisible, linguistic protection against being offended: he takes Conrade’s insult for a high compliment: “Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass. Though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass” (4.2.75–79). Dogberry’s “suspect” for “respect” is what we have come to expect from him. Without his knowing it, he is a delightful and amusing speaker.
To conclude, when Don Pedro asks, in act 5, scene 1, “what offense have these men done?” Dogberry is only too ready to enumerate the case against them: “Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and to conclude, they are lying knaves” (5.1.213–17). All of which is true and spoken with notable vigor and colloquial energy.
Chapter 15
The Wit Combat of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing
The wit combat of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing is a combat, a merry war, between two potential lovers. It is full of insults and provocations, and there is no certainty it will naturally end in marriage. One of the key questions of the play is whether Beatrice and Benedick need the plot of Don Pedro to make them fall in love or whether they will fall in love without interventions. It seems evident that the protagonists do indeed need artificial stimulation to bring them to marriage. They seem preoccupied with each other throughout the play, but that doesn’t necessarily meant they are willing to surrender their aggressive, nonmarried state.
Beatrice’s forthrightly independent—and harsh—tone is established in the first scene. In her first words in the play, she is already making fun of Benedick’s martial valor. Speaking to her uncle, Leonato, she says: “I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?” (1.1.29–30). “Mountanto” is a fencing term for an upward thrust, and it implies that Benedick is a fencer rather than a soldier, but it also has an obviously phallic connotation. Beatrice continues with her comically contemptuous observations: “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed, I promised to eat all of his killing” (1.1.40–43). She cannot stop insulting Benedick’s status as a warrior: “He is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an excellent stomach” (1.1.49–50). A “trencherman” is a gluttonous eater, hardly a heroic figure. Leonato feels the need to apologize for his niece: “There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them” (1.1.59–61).
When Benedick appears in this scene, he continues the merry war with Beatrice, answering her in her own satirical language. When Beatrice says “I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick; nobody marks you,” Benedick replies, “What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” (1.1.113–16). Benedick boasts that he is “loved of all ladies, only you excepted; and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for truly I love none” (1.1.122–24). Beatrice replies in kind, asserting her own independence from the attachments of love: “I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humor for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me” (1.1.126–29). So it seems settled that the two radically independent spirits cannot possibly fall in love with each other.
At the end of act 2, scene 1, Don Pedro offers his ingenious plot to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love with each other and marry: “I will in the interim undertake one of Hercules’ labors, which is, to bring Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection th’ one with th’ other” (2.1.351–54). Don Pedro sees this as an almost impossible undertaking: “If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer; his glory shall be ours, for we are the only love-gods” (2.1.371–73). Leonato is skeptical: “If they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad” (2.1.240–41), but he agrees to participate. Why is everyone so eager to marry off Benedick and Beatrice? There is a continuous theme in Shakespeare’s comedies that the enemies of love cannot survive. Cupid is an all-powerful god who cannot be resisted. Besides, it seems incumbent on everyone in the play to create as many married couples as possible.
Benedick is the first one caught. In act 2, scene 3, he acknowledges his falling in love in a long soliloquy. He has pity on the imagined sufferings for love of Beatrice, and he yields immediately after the love plotters (Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato) have left the stage. He has no hesitation at all when he says: “Love me? Why, it must be requited” (2.3.219–20). He is determined to be “horribly in love with her” (2.3.230) and apologizes for his previous standoffishness:
I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me because I have railed so long against marriage; but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor? No, the world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I s
hould live till I were married. (2.3.230–38)
It is a feeble excuse to attribute all to humor (whim and caprice), but Benedick is resolved to prove a lover. It is amusing that when Beatrice suddenly enters at the end of the scene, she obviously has no idea that Benedick is in love. He interprets everything she says as having a “double meaning” (2.3.252). He is intent on his new resolve: “If I do not take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew. I will go get her picture” (2.3.255–57). A Jew is meant as a person of no faith, and we remember how important it is for Portia’s suitors in The Merchant of Venice to find her picture—“Fair Portia’s counterfeit!” (3.2.115)—in the right casket.
The plotters—this time Hero and her two gentlewomen, Margaret and Ursula—are equally successful in getting Beatrice to fall in love with Benedick. She expresses herself, in soliloquy, in a measured ten-line sonnet at the end of the scene:
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band;
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly. (3.1.111–16)
How can two such adamant enemies of love be won over so quickly? Much Ado About Nothing is clearly a comedy without a strong and intricate psychological underpinning.
Not to pause too long on the details of their love affair, by the end of the play Beatrice and Benedick seem to have returned to their normal, skeptical, witty selves. Benedick declares that he “was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms” (5.2.39–41). Beatrice coyly asks him, “for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?” (5.2.63–65), but Benedick is resolved not to be sentimental: “Suffer love! A good epithet. I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will” (5.2.65–66). The conclusion is Benedick’s: “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably” (5.2.71).
In the last scene of the play, the lovers return to their authentic mocking selves of act 1, scene 1. When Benedick asks “Do not you love me?” (5.4.74), Beatrice replies casually in the same terms: “Why, no; no more than reason” (5.4.74). When Beatrice asks Benedick the same question, “Do not you love me?” (5.4.77), he echoes her answer: “Troth, no; no more than reason” (5.4.77). We are meant to celebrate the fact that the lovers are once more witty speakers. They are not overwhelmed by love. When their companions inform them that they have each written love sonnets to each other, they are almost apologetic about them. Benedick says: “A miracle! Here’s our own hands against our hearts. Come, I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity” (5.4.91–93). Beatrice replies in kind: “I would not deny you; but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption” (5.4.94–96).
Benedick’s penultimate remark in the play ironically expresses his true sentiments. He urges Don Pedro to get married, with this moral caution:
“There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn” (5.4.123–24). The reference to “horn”—the horn of an animal—makes a familiar cuckoldry joke. Benedick takes pains not to be too solemn about the sacrament of marriage.
Chapter 16
The Roman Style of
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar was probably written around 1599, at a time when Shakespeare was at the height of his powers. It is usually dated between Henry V and Hamlet. In style, however, Julius Caesar has no relation to those plays. It employs one of the smallest vocabularies of any play of Shakespeare, and it makes almost no use of figurative, lyric language. Its blank verse has a great many monosyllabic (or near monosyllabic) lines of nine or ten words, and it uses old-fashioned rhetorical devices like apostrophe that are associated with Shakespeare’s earlier work, especially his poem The Rape of Lucrece. Julius Caesar is so unlike the plays of Shakespeare written around the same time that commentators have postulated that Shakespeare created a special Roman style for this play, one in keeping with its Roman subject matter.
Let us begin our discussion with Brutus’s soliloquy. In act 2, scene 1, Brutus is meditating in his orchard, or garden, on what Cassius has told him in act 1, scene 2. He seems nearly convinced to join the conspiracy and to participate in Caesar’s assassination. Never mind that Cassius’s methods and some of his words are almost like those of Iago in Othello. His soliloquy at the end of this scene suggests a certain sleaziness in the way Cassius operates:
Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet I see
Thy honorable mettle may be wrought
From that it is disposed; therefore it is meet
That noble minds keep ever with their likes;
For who so firm that cannot be seduced? (1.2.306–10)
Obviously, Cassius does not consider himself “noble,” as Brutus clearly is. He even says something mean-spirited (and echoed by Iago): “If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius, / He should not humor me” (1.2.312–13). In other words, if the situation were reversed, Brutus could never hope to persuade Cassius to conspiracy.
Of course, Brutus doesn’t realize that Cassius is seducing him. He cannot be aware that Cassius is throwing in at his windows fake testimonials from citizens attesting to the “great opinion / That Rome holds of his name” (1.2.316–17). The issue comes up again in the quarrel scene (4.3), where Cassius seems to be involved in taking bribes. Brutus is straight and direct, a perfect Roman in his strict morality, and his reasoning in the soliloquies in his garden is ethical and without any self-interest. He speaks to himself (and to the audience) with striking candor:
It must be by his [Caesar’s] death; and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crowned.
How that might change his nature, there’s the question. (2.1.10–13)
The reasoning is, obviously, askew. Brutus rejects any personal cause, and this depersonalization is a distinctly Roman feature throughout the play. From the beginning, Brutus joins the conspiracy against Caesar for hypothetical reasons (very unlike Cassius’s motives): “Then lest he may, prevent” (2.1.28). In other words, anticipate Caesar’s proclivities (the old sense of “prevent”) and kill him before he has the chance of becoming a tyrant.
In the first ten lines of this soliloquy, there are three monosyllabic lines with ten separate words: “It must be by his death; and for my part” (2.1.10), “It is the bright day that brings forth the adder” (2.1.14), and “And then I grant we put a sting in him” (2.1.16). There are also a couple of nine-word lines (11 and 17). This establishes a special Roman style throughout the play. It is serious and at times moving, but not particularly lyrical. There is an almost total absence of similes, metaphors, and figurative language. This is imagined to be the way Romans speak. Cassius is passionate and sometimes testy, but he also speaks in a Roman style, and this is also true of Caesar and Antony.
One rhetorical figure that is fairly frequent in the play is the apostrophe, or the address to a personified abstraction. This is typical of Shakespeare’s earliest style. The use of apostrophes in Julius Caesar heightens the sense of formality and abstraction. Just before the conspirators enter, Brutus delivers in soliloquy an extended apostrophe to conspiracy, as if he needs to deal with the abstract idea of conspiracy, personified, before he can encounter the actual conspirators:
O conspiracy,
Sham’st thou to show thy dang’rous brow by night,
When evils are most free? O, then by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage? (2.1.77–81)
Brutus’s “O’s” are the sign that he is making an oration to conspiracy, as if it were an actual entity. He is more comfortable addressing “Conspiracy” than he is in talking with the conspirators. He answers his own question and gives advice to Conspiracy that is meant for the conspirators:
Seek none, conspiracy;
Hide it in smiles and affability:
For if thou path, thy native semblance on,
Not Erebus itself were dim enough
To hide thee from prevention. (2.1.81–85)
Brutus seems especially at ease stating his fears to Conspiracy personified. He is much better at making speeches than he is in dealing with persons.
Another apostrophe, to Error, is meant to account for Cassius’s mistaken suicide. Messala speaks the apostrophe as if it should serve as a proper eulogy for the dead Cassius:
O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child,
Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not? O Error, soon conceived,
Thou never com’st unto a happy birth,
But kill’st the mother that engend’red thee! (5.3.67–71)
The effect of the apostrophes is rhetorical. They are formal, they avoid the expression of personal emotion, and they are part of the general depersonalization of the Roman style.
If we turn to the orations of Brutus and Antony over the dead Caesar, we see that they fit well with what we have been saying about the Roman style. Brutus’s speech is so formal that it seems to miss the mark as a heartfelt expression of sorrow. It is characterized by elaborate antitheses that seem intended to make rhetorical rather than personal points, and it is all spoken in a measured and balanced prose: