of joyous and romantic comedies, we assign it to the year 1598. Dr. Furness is inclined to believe that Shakespeare's comedy may have had its direct source in an older comedy named Benedicte and Betteris, which is named in the Lord Treasurer's accounts for 1612-13. But this, as he admits, is pure conjecture, and it seems much more probable that by Benedicte and Betteris is meant Much Ado itself, which was certainly performed in this year of King James's reign. For the tricks by which the hero and heroine are brought to admit to themselves that they love one another, notwithstanding all their war of words, no source has been discovered. Here probably Shakespeare drew upon his own invention. But in the fifth book of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso appears a variant, if not a source, of the incident by which Claudio is made to believe in the infidelity of Hero. Sir John Harington's translation of the Orlando Furioso had appeared in 1591, but we learn from him that an earlier version of the story which concerns us-that of Ariodante and Genevra-had been made by Turberville. This version is unfortunately lost, nor do we possess The tragecall and pleasaunte history of Ariodanto and Jeneura, of yet earlier date, by a certain Peter Beverley. A play entitled A Historie of Ariodante and Geneuora was presented before Queen Elizabeth in 1582, and from this Shakespeare may possibly have taken the incident of the personation of Hero at the window by her waiting-woman Margaret, an incident that is absent from a novel by Bandello which must certainly be reckoned among Shakespeare's sources immediate or remote. In Bandello's story we have the ascent of a man at night by means of a ladder to the chamber of the heroine, the despair and fury of the lover, his rejection of his mistress, her death, her secret revival, her seclusion, her pretended funeral, with an epitaph on her tomb' (Furness). The scene of Bandello's story is Messina, and the names Leonato and Don Pedro are common to him and Shakespeare. There may have been, as Furness conjectures, some lost English play intermediate between Bandello and Shakespeare, but undoubtedly we are here on the track of the Hero and Claudio plot. Nor, having arrived so far, need we do more than refer to Spenser's tale of Claribell and her handmaid Pryene in the Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto IV, nor to the German play of Jakob Ayrer Die schöne Phoenicia, and other alleged sources variants in drama and romance which have been brought into connexion with Much Ado About Nothing. or The allusions to Much Ado show that it was popular from the first, and in particular the scenes where Dogberry and Verges appear. How indeed could it be other than popular, save at some period, like that of the Restoration, when honest mirth was not enough to satisfy the spectators of the theatre? The strands of the intrigue are admirably twisted together, and out of very diverse elements a complete unity is wrought. It is a play good to read in the study and better to witness on the stage, if the presenters of Benedick and Beatrice have a true conception of their parts and render that conception as if under the musical direction allegro con brio. The play has been cited by Coleridge as an example of Shakespeare's subordination of plot-interest to the interest in character. The criticism is just, and accordingly what Shakespeare derived from his sources is of far less importance than what originated in his own. imagination: Don John is the mainspring of the plot of this play; but he is merely shown and then withdrawn.' The slanders and fraud which interrupt the course of Hero's love are chiefly of importance as giving occasion for a complete understanding between Beatrice and Benedick and an opportunity for the wise Dogberry and goodman Verges to display their wisdom and astuteness. We see from the outset that Benedick and Beatrice are meant for each other. Shakespeare's doctrine concerning the war of the sexes is that it is only a bright prelude to the victory of love and a permanent treaty of peace. Berowne in the end will hold hands with Rosaline. Katherine will rejoice when she can feel herself subdued by the mastery of Petruchio. Beatrice needs only a good excuse for bestowing her best gifts on Benedick. They have known each other before the play opens; they have encountered each other in the lists of mimic strife; each desires no better antagonist. The first word of Beatrice is to inquire whether 'Signior Mountanto' has returned from the wars or no. She has appropriated him as her special theme for mockery; he is already her own for the ends of laughter, and the laughter of Beatrice is so glad an outbreak of the brain and heart that it lies not very far from admiration and love. And Beatrice in turn is already Benedick's dear Lady Disdain; on no one else does he care half so much to try the edge of his wit; he is better pleased to be the subject of her jest than to be praised by another for his valour, his gallantry, his brilliance. But each, for the mirth of it, has taken up an attitude of opposition towards the other, and needs some easily accepted excuse for confessing the lover. If, after this, some generous bond of alliance could be provided, coming not merely from the brain but from the heart and will, the union of true comradeship would be signed and sealed. The joy of life would be deepened and quickened by the sorrow of life. The needed excuse is provided by the trick which makes it no self-betrayal but an act of magnanimity to confess the presence of love. And the bond is added by the opportunity of working, as a single will, to right the grievous wrong under which Hero suffers. Such is the course and progress of the play. The mirth of Beatrice (and no less that of Benedick) is an outbreak of the joyous energy of life; but neither hero nor heroine is frivolous. When the scene darkens, and the shameless accusation is brought against Hero, the first word of Benedick, as soon as the others have departed, is the question 'Lady, have you wept all this while?' and the two wills of man and maid are instantly made one in the desire by active measures to right a cruel injustice. Berowne, the mocker of Love's Labour's Lost, had been dismissed by Rosaline for a twelvemonth to Visit the speechless sick, and still converse The probation of Benedick is not so long; but he too, who is strong and valiant as well as mirthful, is to know the graver side of life and is to prove his courage and his force. It seems as if Shakespeare, while he loved laughter, thought that laughter must live in alliance with a firm grasp of the serious realities of our world, full, as it is, of dark and bright. If the brilliance of wit in Beatrice and Benedick needs a dramatic foil, we have it in the unconscious humour supplied by the magnificent ineptitude of that prince of Elizabethan watchmen, Dogberry, and the dim intelligence of that 'honest soul as ever broke bread', Verges, whom Dogberry patronizes from his heights of superior stupidity. Yet, such is the irony of life, it is by means of these foolish officers that the knot of the plot is disentangled. It is in the most genial spirit that Shakespeare weighs down his own understanding until it touches the level to which, in the pride of his heart and the glory of his office, that of Dogberry rises. The play, at least from the eighteenth century onwards, has had a brilliant stage-history. The Restoration seems to have known Much Ado only through the atrocious Law against Lovers, in which Davenant united something spoilt from Measure for Measure with something spoilt from the present play. Molière was brought to Shakespeare's aid by the Rev. James Miller when in 1737 he produced. his farrago entitled The Universal Passion. But some eleven years later Garrick first appeared as Benedick to Mrs. Pritchard's Beatrice, and immediately after his marriage Garrick again came forward as Benedick the married man'. He loved the part, and chose to figure in it at the Jubilee of 1769. Until the close of his dramatic career he returned to the boards, now and again, as Benedick, and made the part his own. At a later date Mrs. Siddons acted as Beatrice, but her greatest triumphs were rather in tragedy than comedy. In the nineteenth century the Beatrice who best deserves to be remembered was Miss Helen Faucit, but those whose memory cannot reach back to her performance can hardly believe that it surpassed the admirable rendering of the part by Miss Ellen Terry to the Benedick of Henry Irving. Miss Helen Faucit has given an elaborate study of the part in an essay which took the form of a letter addressed to Mr. Ruskin. L 66 She tells how Mr. Charles Kemble, who was then playing a series of farewell performances, singled her out in her earliest days to play before a Covent Garden assembly the part of Beatrice to his own Benedick. A little later when Kemble's last night actually came, and Miss Faucit stood weeping on her mother's shoulder, ‘he saw me,' she writes, and exclaimed "What! my Lady baby Beatrice all in tears! What shall I do to comfort her? What can I give her in remembrance of her first Benedick?" I sobbed out Give me the book from which you studied Benedick". He answered, “You shall have it, my dear, and many others!" And the books by and by arrived with a charming letter on the title-page addressed to his dear little friend'. A critic of the day complained that Helen Faucit had not the hearty laugh of Mrs. Jordan, that made the listener doubt that such a woman could ever be unhappy; but Helen Faucit desired to exhibit, together with that raillery which comes from high spirits tempered by goodness of heart, the tenderness and dignity of the character of Beatrice, seen most strikingly in the perfect faith which she retains in her cousin's innocence and in the indignation felt towards the man who on the evidence only of a shallow trick has outraged her maiden modesty before the altar. Here, as in other plays, the exigencies of a fifth act induce Shakespeare to be far too generous to the unworthy lover, whose repentance is a poor atonement for his offence. Mr. Andrew Lang does not go far beyond the truth when he styles Claudio a hateful young cub'; but in comedy we must not press argument too hard against persons who are needful to evolve a plot. We must grant certain theatrical postulates now and again in order to secure at other times a true representation of life. It is pretty plain,' writes Mr. Lang, that Shakespeare loved not the gay rufflers of his age, though, after all, in opposition to the sullen and suspicious vanity, the heartless raillery, of Claudio, he has given us the immortal Mercutio as a representative of the gallants of his time.' |