English
Literature: Shakespeare in Performance
Tutor:
Vicente Fores
Much
Beatrice:
an avenger?
Erika
Schwartz
Avda. Blasco Ibañez
119, Pta 48B, Piso 12
46022
Matrícula: 6361 7101
3469 0431
E-mail:
ecatsch@alumni.uv.es
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Beatrice’s sufferance 3
3. Beatrice’s avenger function 4
4. Conclusion 7
5. Bibliography 8
1. Introduction
The conflict between Beatrice and
Benedick is a psychological masterpiece and a brilliant illustration of human
nature. Although it is sometimes seen as a sub-plot, the feud between these two
characters is the highlight of the play. Nevertheless, this paper presents a
functional analysis of Beatrice seen as a brave and suffering woman, and almost
as an avenger who tries to break love conventions in her relationship with
Benedick behaving herself in a rebel way and being sharp-tongued; both factors
of an unusual woman in a patriarchal society. Therefore, Beatrice’s defiance
and revenge are main functions that trigger the play in a witty way.
2. Beatrice’s
sufferance
In Much
Ado there is a sympathetic insight into the way women suffer in a world
where men control all the property and make all the rules, but no advocacy of
change – except perhaps that men should try to behave better, and even
sometimes allow women to make their own choices. Marriage is the only career
for a woman, so that almost any husband is better than none – which does not
alter the fact that some husbands are vastly preferable to others. It is an
interesting gap in the story that we know nothing about Beatrice’s fortune. She
is Leonardo’s ward, well-bred, virtuous, sharp-tongued – but has she any money?
(cf. Mares 1988: 31)
The play, like Twelfth Night, stresses love’s pain. “For which of my good parts
did you suffer love of me?” asks Beatrice playfully in act 5. “Suffer love! a
good epithite! I do suffer love indeed,” responds Benedick (5.2.64-7). But the
exaggerated verb reminds us of the play’s real sufferings. Beatrice and
Benedick appear to have been romantically involved at some stage in the play’s
prehistory (2.1.278-81), and one detects in Beatrice’s antimarriage wit
something of the bitter defensiveness of Katherine in The Shrew, who denies interest in marriage to suitors who have
denied interest in her (1.1.59-65): Much
Ado’s only love song advises women to “let them (men) go… converting all
your sounds of woe / Into hey nonny nonny” (2.3.66-9). In this world, words
stab, hurt, “men were deceivers ever” (2.3.63). (cf. Maguire 2004: 186)
These issues are expressed seriously in
the church scene in 4.1, when, having volunteered to do anything for Beatrice,
Benedick declines to kill Claudio. Beatrice prompted to exit by his refusal,
telling Benedick “there is no love in you” (4.1.293-4). Her personal grievance
turns to generalization: “manhood is melted into cur’sies, valor into
compliment, and men and only turn’d into tongue, and trim ones too. He is now
as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie, and swears it” (4.1.319-22). (cf.
Maguire 2004: 186).
Moreover, men in this play are made of
clay. They are a “band of brothers,” united in bachelor banter. They joke about
infidelity, and indulge in sexual slang (1.1.241-2). Their libertine jokes come
from a tradition “in which women can be seen as predatory” (Mangan 1996: 183),
yet their attitude fails to take account of the fact that Beatrice is as
misandronist as they are misogynist: she will not marry “till God make men of
some other mettle than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster’d
with a piece of valiant dust?” (2.1.59-61). (cf. Maguire: 2004: 187).
3. Beatrice’s avenger
function and position
According to Rice (2000: 1), the first
scene of act four concludes with Beatrice and Benedick alone, hesitantly
swearing their love for one another. Beatrice has just witnessed the
humiliation of her cousin Hero at the hands of Benedick’s companions;
Shakespeare has, in fact, loosen the full complement of patriarchal authority
against Beatrice and Hero, threatening both with the permanent
"stain" of unchastely behaviour. Beatrice’s first reaction to
Benedick’s affirmation of love is that he must "not swear and eat it"—that
he not subsequently retracts his pledge. This leads to an exchange of puns, in
which Benedick swears he will "make him eat it that says I love not
you" (IV.i.280). Initially, this traditional conceit of love as a
consumable part of the self, a transcendent synecdoche of the material body,
indicates the pair’s self-positioning as legitimate lovers within the symbolic
order. But Beatrice puts Benedick’s "word" immediately to the test
with her demand that he "kill Claudio." Benedick’s denial—"not
for the wide world" (IV.i.288)—elicits her anger at and sense of
helplessness within the play’s gender hierarchy, for would that she "were
a man" she could then "eat his [Claudio’s] heart in the market
place" (IV.i.303-04). Beatrice invokes the rhetoric of vengeance by
employing language of the "typical" tragic avenger whose actions,
motivated by a growing recognition of the lack of innate social justice,
traditionally move the avenger away from the culturally acceptable to its
unsanctioned margins. (cf. Rice 2000: 1)
Beatrice’s
frustration with her inability
to act, however, is not merely a by-product of a generalized "descent into
the self," but rather her recognition of the limit of her subjectivity as
a woman constituted as such by her culture. This is a cultural-discursive
tradition engaged by Beatrice in the scene. For Beatrice realizes that she
cannot act out revenge because
she is a woman and thus locked into specific gender roles: "I cannot be a
man with wishing, / therefore I will die a woman with grieving"
(IV.i.317-18). The authority of multiple discourses forbids Beatrice to assume
the role of avenger, constructing for her a "natural" feminine
position of passive objectification and acceptance of the Law, rather than its
questioning. Simply to invoke such active, violent, and transgressive language
destabilizes Beatrice’s gender position—thus her frustrated recognition that
her action is already circumscribed, limited to grieving for injustice rather
than acting upon such grief. (cf. Rice 2000:2)
Beatrice’s
desire to "eat" Claudio’s heart in the "market place" is
thus frustrated not simply because she lacks the "stomach" to become
an avenger, but because her gender will not allow for a materialization of her
desire; she can speak of her desires all she wants (as long as they are
directed to the sympathetic ears of Benedick and not, for instance, to the
insuperable patriarchal assumptions manifested by the play’s authority
figures), but she cannot enact them. And this is how another cultural-discursive
tradition restricts her subjectivity, for the cultural limits that Beatrice has
recognized she cannot cross -enacting revenge by acting as a man- are in turn
defined by community.
Beatrice’s
complaints are thus doubly important to the continual establishment of
community and its concurrent performance of subjectivity. For her desire to
usurp "man’s estate" -the privilege of revenge- reinforces the
distinction between "innate" masculine and feminine subjectivity. In Much
Ado About Nothing, such a threat remains linguistic and potential, but as
Orsino in Twelfth Night reminds
us, this condition persists because of hegemonic notions of the Renaissance
"nature" of women: "their love may be called appetite, / No
motion of the liver, but the palate, / That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and
revolt"( II.iv.94-97). An unchecked "appetite" is indeed a
primary component of a feminine gender identity; situated beyond the bounds of
rational control and seated within the passions rather than the "higher"
organs (such as the liver), feminine desire simultaneously lacks more and
devours more, but is inherently inconstant in its hunger. As Orsino opines, a
woman’s heart simply cannot hold enough to remain sated; always in need of
"controllment" through (masculine) interpretation, it concurrently
persists beyond interpretation.
Thus, by constructing a woman’s desire as simultaneously
devouring—cannibalistic—and incomplete and inferior, the patriarchal
order can effectively locate potentially transgressive behavior as originating
outside the male community. (cf. Rice 2000: 3)
4. Conclusion
Beatrice
is in Much Ado About Nothing what
Katherina was not let to be in The Taming
of the Shrew. Acting as a sufferer and avenger, Beatrice is capable to show
women’s contrasts, to defy a society that was still unwilling to see women’s
wit, women’s feelings, and intelligence.
5. Bibliography
Primary
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Secondary
1) Maguire, Laurie E. Studying Shakespeare: a guide to the plays.
2) Mangan, Michael. Preface to Shakespeare’s Comedies, 1594-1603.
3) Mares, F. H. Much
4) Rice, Raymond. J.
“Cannibalism and the act of Revenge in Jacobean Drama”. 2000.
<http://www.umpi.maine.edu/~ricer/research/cannibalism.htm>