Catching the Benedick

            Beatrice and Benedick; their very names tell us that they are surely meant to be together.  And of course, so it goes, for “Much Ado About Nothing” is, as the title implies, a comedy—even if the last word implies, by way of an Elizabethan pun, a slightly bawdier comedy than we are given.  Indeed, the closest we come to that type of comedy is in Signior Benedick’s very first words in the play:

                        [Don] Pedro:…I think this is your daughter.

Leonato: Her mother hath many times told me so.

Benedick: Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?

Leonato: Signior Benedick, no; for then were you a child. (I.i.92-96)

            From there on, the comedy is pretty much all chastity and virtue (okay, maybe not all); and yet, having gotten that bawdy bit out of the way, we are still left with these two: Benedick, that blessed man, and Beatrice, the one who blesses him (for thus do the names signify).  That blessing will come in the form of marriage, and in this play, marriage is seen as so clearly a blessing, that when, at the last, Don Pedro refers to “Benedick, the married man” (V.iv.98), the phrase is practically a tautology, on the order of “unmarried bachelors” (which class, despite his promise made in the first scene, no longer includes Benedick; cf. I.i.219).  So much goes on in that first scene, so many themes established to be played out, or played upon, later in the play.  One which may go unnoted (in this play that is all about noting, as the title says) is Beatrice’s characterization of her enemy in her “merry war” (I.i.54) as a disease called “the Benedict.”  This is a bit of wit that will catch up with her, when she herself catches the Benedick as a woman catches a cold.

            In the opening scene, as Shakespeare is busy showing us Beatrice’s wit to establish her character, he gives her the following words to speak about the fact that Benedick “is most in the company of the right noble Claudio” (I.i.73-74): “Oh Lord, he will hang upon him like a disease!  He is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad.  God help the noble Claudio!  If he have caught the Benedick, it will cost him a thousand pound ere ’a be cured” (75-79).  In response to this, her uncle says, “You will never run mad, niece.”—to which she replies, “No, not till a hot January” (82-83)—or as we might say, “Not till a cold day in Hell”—both are meant as images of a day that will never come…

            Or will it?  Leonato’s statement to his niece helps to establish her character as a woman of “cold blood” (her words; 116) who “cannot endure to hear tell of a husband” (Don Pedro’s description of her; II.i.310); and yet, characterizations are made to be undermined, and characters to change—especially in Shakespeare.  In the case of Beatrice, it is the words of Ursula, Margaret, and Hero in the third act that put “fire...in [her] ears” (III.i.107) and warm her cold blood so that she falls in love with Benedick (or admits to the love already there).  In the very next scene in which we see her (III.iv)—and here comes the funny part—she is sick.

            Ahh, now we get it.  There is a meaningful pattern here, and it answers the question: why does Beatrice get sick from the dampness of the garden when the three other women in the same scene do not?  The answer is simple: William Shakespeare wills it so.  But why make his subordinate heroine sick when her sickness changes nothing in the outworkings of the plot?  The answer can be found at the symbolic level.  Beatrice’s sickness is not a plot device, but a symbol: for she, who, in the very first scene originated the conceit of “a disease…[called] the Benedick” now seems to have caught the very same illness she had lamented in others, and her physical sickness is a sign to us to make the connection.  Quite simply, her illness is a joke, and the other characters get it.  It is for this reason that Margaret hands her some carduus benedictus and urges, “lay it to your heart.  It is the only thing for a qualm” (III.iv.66-68).  Aye, Margaret discerns that Beatrice hath caught the Benedick and her suggested treatment is a clear bit of ribbing.  Beatrice, of course, perceives this & asks, “Benedictus?  Why benedictus?  You have some moral in this benedictus?" (70-71).  Of course she does, and she plows right into it in her next speech, in spite of opening with overt denial, claiming “I have no moral meaning” (72-73).

            So we can see that the trap whereby Cupid catches Beatrice (cf. Hero’s exiting couplet in III.i.105-06: “…loving goes by haps; / Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”) is actually laid in part by Beatrice herself in the very first scene.  It is a fine irony that her very own witty conceit is turned back upon her head, and she catches the Benedick, sick tune and all, just as Benedick suffers love for her (V.ii.57-60).  In the words of that other great wit, Heathcliff Huxtable, she has “become what [she has] mocked.”