Much Ado About Womanhood

Ending with harmony and joy, Much Ado About Nothing is an engagingly playful comedy that leaves the audience feeling light of spirit.  Beatrice is one of the most dynamic and interesting female characters Shakespeare ever wrote, as she is bursting with spirit, intelligence, humor, and compassion. Her banter with Benedick is ingenious, ripe with multiple layers of irony and subtexts.  The beauty of Beatrice is that she is utterly likeable; she is not coarse like Katharina, naive like Juliet, or docile like Hero, or simplistic like Bianca.  She is a woman in command, yet charming enough to get away with it.  And, yet, Beatrice is not too proud to expose her kindly heart, as she dies a thousand deaths with Hero or gently refutes Don Pedro’s offer to marry her. In Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation, Emma Thompson does a brilliant job personify the feisty vitality of this character.  

Beatrice surrenders easily to Benedick’s alleged love of her, but is not “tamed” like Katharina.  In a final confrontation between Benedick and Beatrice, he asks her if she loves him, to which she responds, “Why, no; no more than reason” (V.iv.78).  Beatrice refuse to show her belly under Benedick has first.  As a side note, speaking of Beatrice,

Even though women were subjugated by men in the Elizabethan era, and were expected to obey and  submit to the finer sex, it is not completely out of sync that Shakespeare created a strong woman suggestive of a woman from freer social times.  Women like Beatrice likely did exist, and did so in the likeness of the archetype of Queen Elizabeth herself.  If a woman like Beatrice in his time was as rare as the cuckoo bird, then Shakespeare was more than the visionary we have ever imagined.

The one aspect of the play that remains unsettling is Hero’s besmirching and her unquestioning forgiveness of the wrong.  She is powerless and does not think twice about it—her fate is in her father’s and her future husband’s control.  It is a sad case that is, unfortunately, as realistic as any other detail in the play.  A disgraced woman was to be dispensed of.