#musingsofaretiredunicorn

Ok so, a big theme in Much Ado is realistic vs idealized love, and there’s also a lot of generalizations about love, but Claudio and Benedick generalize about love in totally opposite ways. At the beginning of the play, Claudio sees Hero and immediately thinks ‘she is beautiful and I would like to marry her’. Sure, he’s seen her before, but he was distracted because he was, you know, about to go to war, but in the first scene, he tells Don Pedro that he “liked her ere I went to wars.” Like, he didn’t realize he was in love with her til after, but it was love at first sight.

Claudio, through the whole play, is idealistic – he wants everything to be perfect, to be black and white. There is no room for ‘maybe’ in his character (which, unfortunately means he does not use his brain cells). When he talks about Hero, he almost always talks about her beauty or her chastity. He’s focused on the superficial, and he’s hyperbolic (almost like Romeo). He’s trying really hard to be the perfect courtly lover stereotype – he can’t just say ‘Hero is beautiful’, oh no, he has to say “she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on”. Benedick even says Claudio used to speak “plain and to the purpose” but now his words are “fantastical”. So Claudio is way over the top.

Claudio expects everything to be perfect. Another big theme in the play is appearance vs reality. Claudio thinks that because Hero looks perfect, she must be perfect, and Claudio seems to be incapable of interpreting things beyond the surface-level, which is foreshadowed when he sees Don Pedro with Hero. He literally planned this with Don Pedro, but as soon as Don John and Borachio show up and say ‘oh by the way, DP’s in love with Hero’, Claudio’s like ‘damn, Don Pedro must be in love with Hero’. Y’all know Shakespeare loves a soliloquy, and Claudio does get one here, but it isn’t a ‘hm should I listen to Don John who is notoriously untrustworthy’ soliloquy, it’s a ‘well I guess Don Pedro screwed me over’ soliloquy. Claudio sees/hears something, has no evidence to contradict it and says ‘well, that must be true’. He doesn’t look for counter evidence or take Don John’s character into account. He’s gullible, black-and-white, and idealistic. If someone says something he can’t, for a fact, disprove, it must be true.

Later, when he accuses Hero, he says, “O Hero, what a Hero hadst thou been, / If half thy outward graces had been placed / About thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart!” He’s finally learned that people aren’t always what they seem, but HE LEARNED IT FROM THE WRONG PERSON because he always sticks with his first impression, instead of like, trusting the person he loves and wants to marry. His first instinct was to believe Don John at the party that Don Pedro isn’t a loyal friend, and a few scenes later, to believe Hero isn’t a loyal fiancée. His trust is completely based on perfection: he wants people to be perfect, and when they aren’t, he doesn’t just like. move on. He completely goes off the rails. In the party scene, he’s furious with Don Pedro, which makes him snap at Benedick and storm off in a huff (meanwhile Benedick is stood there like ????????????), and when he accuses Hero, he can’t just do it quietly. Like Beatrice complains, he waits til they are in church in front of God and everybody and completely destroys her life. He learns one negative thing about her and her perfection is destroyed and he will never love again.

Benedick, on the other hand, does not believe in love at first sight. He doesn’t believe in love at all. Nearly every single one of his lines in the first scene is him complaining about love. He says every man who marries will eventually “wear his cap with suspicion”. (This means married men have to wear caps to cover up their cuckold horns – Elizabethans had a sort of… urban legend that if your wife cheated on you, you would grow horns). So Benedick is basically saying ‘women will never be faithful’ (the irony of this is apparent later when Balthasar sings “men were deceivers ever”). However, Benedick also says a lot of stuff about being a ladies man??? He’s very inconsistent – the whole ‘appearance vs reality’ thing comes up with him too bc its like he really doesn’t want people to think he’s interested in romantic love but he also really wants them to think he can Get It. Who is the real Benedick????? We don't really know bc he keeps swapping personalities. Personally I think it’s interesting how Shakespeare seems to like flipping the connotations we expect… in Romeo and Juliet, he gives day a negative connotation and night a positive one, which is almost unheard of in western literature, and in Much Ado, the consistent character (Claudio, who is consistently gullible and idealistic) is a much less positive character then the inconsistent one (Benedick, who has no clue what he is doing ever).

A few scenes later, Benedick is in the garden complaining about how men make fun of other men who fall in love, then become the exact thing they’re complaining about by falling in love “and such a man is Claudio”. He goes on to say he will never fall in love (methinks he doth protest too much), but if he does the woman he loves will be perfect in every way. On the surface, it sounds like he has high standards, but what he’s really saying is ‘I will never marry because no such woman exists’ (not unlike Beatrice saying a man with no beard is too young for her but a man with a beard is too old – she’s saying she won’t marry because there is no such man in between – you either have a beard or you don’t). Benedick is an idiot, but not that kind of idiot. He knows the perfect woman doesn’t exist. Where Claudio is idealistic, Benedick is realistic.

……and then like one page later, he hears his friends say Beatrice loves him and he goes ‘oh hell yeah I will be horribly in love with her’. His soliloquy from earlier that said ‘men are idiots because they mock love then fall in love’? He’s proving himself right. But the difference between him and Claudio is that he can always acknowledge Beatrice’s faults. Even in the very beginning, he says Beatrice is prettier than Hero, though she is unfortunately “possessed with a fury”. Even now, when he’s deluded into thinking she loves him, and he’s listing off her virtues, he can still say she is “wise, but for loving me; by my troth, it is no addition to her wit”, and not only is he acknowledging her faults, he’s also acknowledging his. He even decides to be kind to her because he hears his friends roasting him and thinks ‘wow am I like that? I need to fix that’. While Claudio refuses to even consider that he might be wrong about distrusting Hero, Benedick is making a list of his own flaws and calling it Things I Need To Work On. Claudio’s list is more like Things I Am Right About Without Doing Any Critical Thinking.

What this all boils down to, for me, anyway, is again, that idea of realistic vs idealistic. Claudio is idealistic about himself too. He always thinks he’s right. Benedick knows he has flaws and actively tries to fix them. Claudio has unrealistic expectations of perfection. That whole ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ thing does NOT apply to him. If he finds an alteration he will not only stop loving you, he will give up on love forever, and ruin your entire life in front of every single person you know. He thinks love is nice. That it’s a warm fuzzy feeling that makes you feel like chirping birds helped you get dressed in the morning. But Benedick knows that love is a choice. His love for Beatrice isn’t love at first sight. In fact, they had a past relationship that ended badly. His feelings for Beatrice change on a dime because he decides he is going to love her, which is a crucial part of any real relationship, romantic or otherwise. We have to choose to love people in spite of their failings because everyone has failings. If we give up on everyone who fails us, we will be alone – just like Claudio and Don Pedro end up isolated from everyone in Act 4 and 5.

When Hero and Claudio reconcile, they slip right back into their dramatic overwrought nonsense – Hero’s all ‘I truly was dead, because you killed me, but I have returned to life’. Beatrice and Benedick are like “I take you for pity” and ‘here’s a shitty sonnet you wrote about me lmao’. Claudio and Hero feel like Romeo and Juliet 2.0, but Beatrice and Benedick sound like your favourite real-life married couple because they can make fun of each other. So again, Shakespeare is playing with expected connotations: the person who’s more serious should probably be a more positive character than the one who can’t take anything seriously, but it’s Benedick, who literally never stops joking around, who is the positive character, and Claudio, who takes everything Very Seriously, who ends up looking like an idiot.