Character analyses of Beatrice:
Beatrice is undoubtedly one of the strongest female characters Shakespeare has ever created. She is the niece of Leonato, a wealthy governor of Messina and she obtains a close relationship with his daughter Hero. The contrast between the polite and quiet Hero and Beatrice, who is a very feisty and sharp lady, is highly noticeable throughout the whole play. Although the play’s main theme is that of the innocent Hero being falsely accused of adultery, Shakespeare is definitely showing us through the character of Beatrice how a woman should be able to behave. The society in Messina is structured very much like the Elizabethan one, which first witnessed the play. In Shakespeare’s times it was normal for the father to chose his daughter’s hand in marriage. It was the father who decided who she would marry, always considering the wealth and the money involved. Love was not important, and neither was the woman’s free will. A renaissance woman back then did not have a free will. It was a male society with oppressive institutions vested in elderly male authority, property rights – and proprietorial rights in women. We can clearly make this out of the play, like when Antonio, Leonato’s brother, says to Hero: “Well, niece, I trust you will be rul’d by your father.” (II.1,442-43). Throughout the play Hero hardly says a word, her father Leonato and the other members of her family speak for her. She is being suppressed. Hero is a girl wholly constructed by family and society, without one spark of individual will. It is her father who controls her present life and her future. Only when Hero dies and is reborn, she finds her tongue for the first time, a tongue which Beatrice has never lost.
Beatrice is a woman who openly defies male subjection. “Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust, to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I’ll none: Adam’s sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.” (II.1, 451-55). She rebels against the unequal status of women in renaissance society. “Is ‘a not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured, my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What! Bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then with public accusation, uncover’d slander, unmitigated rancour – O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place.” (IV.1, 1951-57). When Hero has been humiliated and accused of violating her chastity, Beatrice explodes with fury at Claudio for mistreating her cousin. Here, she means that if she were a man, she could take vengeance on the man that slandered her cousin. But she is a woman, so she cannot defend her in her honour whilst a man can by fighting in a duel or a battle.
Beatrice is a very strong woman in the sense that she is extraordinarily independent and courageous for her time. To her, independence is of extreme importance. At one moment in the play, Leonato says to her “Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband” to which she replies “Not till God make men of some other metal than earth.” (II.1, 449-51). She seems confident that she does not want to submit to marriage, in order to obtain her self-sufficiency. It is clear that Beatrice is very much aware of the existing social pressure and the expectance of certain traditional behaviour of male and female individuals. But she refuses to submit to it. Her way of thinking quite resembles the way most women in our present society think about these matters. Women don’t want to be dependent of a man anymore, they want to go to university and work for a living so that they can look after their selves. They don’t let themselves be suppressed by men anymore, like we see in the case of Hero. Nowadays, women are confident that they are equal to the male gender. We also chose who we fall in love with and marry for ourselves, no matter what our parents might think. Although, in some countries, like Morocco, women are still being seen as unequal to men.
As I mentioned, Beatrice refuses to marry because she want to preserve her independency. She is unwilling to eschew her liberty and submit to the will of a controlling husband. She also explains in a very witty manner that she must remain unmarried because she has not discovered her perfect, equal partner yet: “Lord! I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face […]” (II.1, 423-24). Afterwards, her uncle simply replies that if she does not like men with a beard that she should chose a husband without one. To which Beatrice replies with delightful wit: “What should I do with him? Dress him in my apparel, and make him my waiting gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man I am not for him […]” (II.1, 426-31). She means that there is no man that would be a perfect match for her. He that is less than a man is not manly enough to satisfy her desires, and he that has a beard is not youthful enough for her. But this riddle is not particular to Beatrice. In Renaissance literature and culture, particularly in Shakespeare, youths on the cusp of manhood are often the most coveted objects of sexual desire. Also, when Beatrice jokes that she would dress up a beardless youth as a woman, there is a hidden double meaning in there. In Shakespeare’s time, the actor playing Beatrice would have been doing exactly that, since all female roles were played by prepubescent boys until the late 17th century. The beardless adolescent had a special, youthful allure that provoked the desires of both men and women at those times. Beatrice’s desire for a man who is caught between youth and maturity was in fact the sexual ideal at that time.
However, she does admit to her loneliness after she hears the news of Claudio and Hero’s engagement: “Good Lord, for alliance! Thus goes every one to the world but I, and I am sunburnt; I may sit in a corner and cry ‘Heigh-ho for a husband!” (II.1, 695-97). A woman might be strong and independent, still she will always keep on feeling a desire to be loved. People are not made to spend their lives alone. We will always want to share our happiness with somebody else, who loves and cherishes us. Single independent women hardly ever admit to being lonely, but deep down they are. It is simply human. What Beatrice really wants is a finding a partner who loves her and treats her as his equal. She is not entirely opposed to marriage, as long as it is based on mutual love, respect and equality. Basically, she wants exactly the same as what the modern woman in today’s society wants. She is a strong female character that is already ahead of her time concerning the importance of equal treatment and woman’s rights.
The song sung by Balthasar, an attendant on Don Pedro, in the third scene of act two tells us a lot about Beatrice’s character. In de film version of the play, this very same song is sung by Beatrice herself at the very beginning. The song is actually the key to the whole play. It describes her feelings about Signior Benedick. She sings that “men are deceivers ever”, by which she refers at her previous relationship with Benedick, who suddenly left her. Men always leave, as she describes it they have one foot in sea and one on shore, they are never constant to one thing. This song gets across the message of the entire play and it proves to us that Shakespeare definitely understood women very well.
At the very beginning of the play Beatrice’s uncle Leonato tells the messenger: “You must not, sir, mistake my niece: there is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.” (I.1, 53-56). Leonato, being the visible representative of patriarchy –governor of Messina and head of an extensive household –feels obliged to explain to the male messenger the odd behaviour of a young woman under his protection and assert her normalcy by using the word ‘mistake’. He is obviously worried that his female relation might prove impenetrable to the ‘normal’ male gaze. What Leonato means by the ‘skirmishes’ of Benedick and Beatrice is what is traditionally known as ‘the battle of the sexes’, masculine and feminine genders in continual opposition. However, the element of merriment in this conflict disrupts traditional assumptions about the proper behaviour of young men and women: Benedick and Beatrice –Beatrice in particulary –via their verbal wit seem connected to a source of energy that cannot be fully contained by social forms. This again shows that Beatrice is not a typical renaissance girl. She is not willing to be subdued by the male expectations of society. She is not afraid to speak freely and tell her male companions what she thinks about them. The character of Beatrice actually reminds us a whole lot about Queen Elizabeth I, the monarch of Shakespeare’s time. When Elizabeth I came to the throne, the Englishmen were not pleased. They thought it unholy and unnaturally that a woman should reign and have empire above men. But, Queen Elizabeth was the one who brought England to its golden age in English history, when England asserted itself vigorously as a major European power in politics, commerce and arts. She was an extremely powerful woman, the product of a fine Renaissance education who had learned the need for a strong secular leadership. Like Beatrice, she was a self-sufficient woman who made all decisions herself, advised only at her request. She never married, out of her own free will, although she was seen among her contemporaries as a social and sexual enigma by refraining from marriage, sex, and childbirth. One of the reasons why she might not have married could be because a Christian wife was expected to defer to her husband’s authority. This is also what Beatrice defies.
Already in the first few lines of the play we learn that Beatrice is not very keen of Signior Benedick, the young lord of Padua. She constantly mocks him with elaborately tooled jokes and puns. There is a merry war of wit going on between them wherein one constantly tries to outdo the other with clever insults. The play suggests that the reason for Beatrice’s constant attacking of Benedick lies in their past. Beatrice gives us a few hints out of which we can make out that she and Benedick were once lovers: “[…] I know you of old.” (I.1, 130), “Indeed, my Lord, he lent it [his heart] me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one; marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your Grace may well say I have lost it.” (II.1, 659-62). We may assume that at one moment in their relationship, Benedick left her. In the play we clearly see that Beatrice has not forgiven Benedick for breaking her heart. Although she still has some feelings for him, she refuses to let him know and therefore she reacts in a way as if she hates him thoroughly. However, this is just her way of defending herself. She refuses to let him sweep her off her feet again, she wants to make him clear that this is never going to happen. She wants to show him that she is over him and that she does not care at all for him, the reason being that she gave him her whole heart, and he scattered it into pieces.
Beatrice constantly attacks Benedick with feisty remarks because he has hurt her in the past. When we compare Beatrice’s reaction with Hero’s, after Claudio has publicly offended her in her honour, we notice a major contrast. It takes Beatrice a long time to forgive Benedick for leaving her and trusting him again. She hates him for having hurt her feelings in the past, which is why she constantly mocks him, while Hero takes Claudio back and marries him without even saying a word about the fact that he has publicly rejected her at the wedding ceremony. She does not stand up for herself in contrast to Beatrice. Hero is obviously very much suppressed by society, she obeys her father and does not have the right to utter how she really feels. But, Beatrice believes in her right to speak her mind and act the way she wants to, as opposed to what society expects from women, although this behaviour for a woman was not common in Shakespeare’s time.
However, Beatrice eventually is not as hardened as she might seem. When she finds out, through the deceit of Hero and Margaret, that Benedick is hopelessly but secretly in love with her, she opens herself up to the sensitivities and weaknesses of love. She lets us see the vulnerable side of herself: “And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee, Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand; If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee To bind our loves up in a holy band; For others say thou dost deserve, and I Believe it better than reportingly.” (III.1, 1191-96). The fact that she immediately says that she will love him to shows us that she never stopped loving him, she just put on a strong face and attitude. Although, at first she does not want to admit to Benedick that she loves him, even when he tells her that he “loves nothing in the world as well as her”. She is does not confess to loving him, but we do see a change in her answers, which are more evasive and less harsh then before. Eventually she tells him that she wants to protest the fact that she loves him, but that she can not because her love is too strong.
Both Benedick and Beatrice are so wise that it looks like their love will grow into a deep, mature relationship in which both will continue to sparkle in the other’s company. They are both very lively and independent characters, and although they manage to speak sweetly to each other, they will never lose their biting wit. They will keep on teasing each other with clever never-ending insults. Benedick sums up their situation by saying: “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.” (V.2, 2474). Additionally, the bringing together of two prickly, unconventional adults in marriage –into conformity with the structures of society which they have hitherto managed to flout –holds a joyful animation for the audience. None can finally escape the powerful coercion of our social system: “No, the world must be peopled.” (II.3, 1048). The world is peopled via the ceremony of Christian marriage. It is over all fascinating for the audience to see that although Beatrice has a strong will and is not afraid to stand up for herself and speak her mind, she still finds herself to be happily married at the end.
Beatrice is definitely a very important character in the collection of Shakespeare’s plays. She is a pleasant-spirited lady with a sharp tongue and is not afraid to use it. Although she constantly mocks Benedick with elaborately tooled jokes and puns, she is also generous and loving. Her strength of spirit, sense of independence, and fierce wit definitely place her among the most powerful female characters in Shakespeare’s work. She is the prototype of today’s independent woman but with a jest of renaissance splendour. |