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‘Returned from the Wars’: Comedy and Masculine Post-war

Character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing
Author: Susan Harlan
Date: June 24, 2013
From: Upstart
Reprint In: Shakespearean Criticism(Vol. 167)
Document Type: Critical essay
Length: 13,323 words

Full Text:
[(essay date 2015) In the following essay, Harlan argues that the war alluded to at the beginning of Much Ado about Nothing provides
important context for understanding the actions of Benedick and Claudio. Both men, she observes, are soldiers freshly returned from the
battlefield, but they react differently to the demands of peacetime and civic life.]

I. Modulating War in Comedy

In 1.1 of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (c.1598-89), a Messenger reports that a group of soldiers is on its way to Messina. He
tells Leonato that the prince Don Pedro was “not three leagues off when I left him” (1.1.3), a physical distance that, although rapidly
closing, draws attention to the geographical distance of the off-stage “action” of the concluded battle (1.1.6), as do the letters that the
Messenger says he has delivered to Claudio’s uncle (1.1.19). These letters, which contain reports of Claudio’s military deeds, travel
across time and space to inform the homefront of distant wars, and his uncle reportedly reacts with tears of “joy” upon reading them
(1.1.21), although he never appears in the play. We might also note what the letters do not contain: accounts of the horrors of war that are
registered in Shakespeare’s histories, tragedies, and Roman plays. Certainly, Claudio’s uncle’s reaction is shaped by the heroic narrative
of victory contained in the letters, texts to which no one else has direct access. By narrating only his “joy” (a term that Leonato then
repeats twice), the Messenger suggests that this war will not be defined by combat, which is downplayed in his report of victory. He also
suggests that “joy” is the only available reaction to military exploits in the context of the play we are about to see. The theatrical audience,
it seems, should understand Claudio’s uncle as representative of the citizens and courtiers of Messina: he models the correct response to
news about this war, both for other characters in the play and for the theatrical audience.

The Messenger also operates as a kind of missive, for he brings information about the concluded war to the homefront population, and
his report—like Claudio’s uncle’s joy—signals how war, and those who fight in wars, will be allowed to signify in Much Ado. In a play so
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concerned with nothings and nothingness, his report resists an understanding of war as necessitating loss. The homefront learns that no
one has died in battle or, more precisely, “none of name” (1.1.7). In 1 Henry IV and Henry V, death in battle gives the noble dead a name
and assures that they will be remembered and celebrated. In Much Ado, the possibility of mourning is closed down: these nameless,
presumably non-gentlemanly, soldiers do not matter to the homefront or, by extension, to the theatrical audience. But Claudio stands out
from this anonymous mass, as do Benedick and the Prince. They are all named by the Messenger in the opening moments of the play,
and their names carry a currency that their anonymous fellow soldiers are denied. The Messenger’s report is the first indication that this
play will demonstrate an investment in the figure of the soldier in society and the expectations, both militaristic and romantic, this society
holds for soldierly habitus. These male characters figure into a glorified narrative of military victory, and Leonato’s response to this
narrative is defined by a rhetoric of amplification that figures this lack of loss as a doubling of military achievement, a sort of mathematical
miracle: “A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers” (1.1.8-9). His reference to “full numbers” echoes the
Messenger’s “none of name,” pushing back even more resolutely against an understanding of the war that would allow for dead soldiers.
The doubled victory (“twice itself”) is both a vision of excess and a universal rule of combat, for Leonato seems to speak from military
experience, although this experience remains shadowy. This language of amplification also extends to the Messenger’s account of
Claudio’s military service. He reports that, “He hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of
a lion. He hath indeed better bettered expectation than you must expect of me to tell you how” (1.1.13-17). Claudio has not simply
“bettered” his military antagonists; he has “better bettered expectation,” a phrase that positions the military combatant in relationship not
to his enemy but to the homefront. It is not enough to better one’s enemy in battle—one must also meet and exceed the expectations of
friends and family at home, thus assuring one’s heroic status upon one’s return.

This article takes as its focus how the modulation of war discourse in deference to genre informs the representation of masculine post-
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war character. In the context of the marriage market of romantic comedy, the most relevant aspect of “character” is how these returned
3
soldiers operate as potential husbands. Critics have tended to assume that this military conflict, which is represented in such sunny
4
terms in these opening moments, cannot possibly inform the play’s characters or marriage plots in a meaningful way.
This assumption is predicated on another: namely, that there is no real relationship between off-stage or concluded wars and masculine
character in the context of a comedy, although such a dynamic is taken for granted in tragic plays such as Othello (c.1603), in which the
5
romantic battle and near-fatal shipwreck of Act 2 burnish Othello’s already stellar reputation for loyal service to the state. I would like to
challenge this assumption here, suggesting that we should consider how the war on the margins of Much Ado informs the representation
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of individual character and group social relations. In the opening moments of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1600-05), another comedy
that challenges this assumption, Theseus embeds his post-war self in a new comedic structure, promising future behaviors that conform
to the audience’s generic expectations:

Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword,

And won thy love doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.
(1.1.16-19)
His nostalgic paradox—that one can “woo” with one’s sword and “win” a wife by inflicting injuries—retrospectively reframes the military
violence by which he claimed Hippolyta as a form of wooing. While he does not obscure the violence of their past encounter, he engages
in an act of modulation when he acknowledges a pressing and present need to shift “keys” or modes: not to erase the concluded war, but
to reimagine the future in celebratory comedic terms. His musical metaphor signals a shift in tone and, by extension, in genre. Indeed, he
assures Hippolyta that he will take on a new role in the comedy in which they perform, and he compels her to do the same. Like Theseus,
Benedick’s and Claudio’s ability, or inability, to enter into romantic narratives is informed by their very different understandings of their
past military service. Both returned soldiers actually say quite a lot about this concluded war and their relationship to it.

The status of these men as “returned” is in part constructed by the architecture of the early modern English theater. The off-stage space is
often associated with the past; it is not only a physical space but also a cognitive one with its own temporality. Lina Perkins Wilder notes
that, “The space backstage, the gallery, the discovery space, the space under the stage: all of these are deployed in Shakespeare’s
memory theatre as mnemonic spaces. … They are inhabited by what is no longer there—and must therefore be remembered” (18).
Certainly, off-stage wars figure to varying degrees in many Shakespearean comedies, including Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.1598) and All’s
Well That Ends Well (c.1604-05). The Comedy of Errors (c.1594-95) is shadowed by mercantile warfare between Syracuse and Messina,
and the off-stage sea battles in Twelfth Night (c.1602) generate problems between Orsino and Antonio that threaten to erupt into
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violence. In these plays, the audience receives reports of these conflicts, but the boundary between the militaristic and the civic is
effectively policed. Marginalized military conflict is also part of the physical and cognitive landscape of many non-Shakespearean English
comedies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, perhaps most notably Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (c.1607-08) and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday (c.1600). In The Shoemakers’ Holiday, the war is figured as
geographically distant—it takes place in France—but its effects are felt at home in the conscription-dodging, non-participating Lacy and,
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ultimately, in the play’s participating soldier Rafe, who is presumed dead but returns from battle wounded. The Knight of the Burning
Pestle situates militarism largely in Mile End, a space of mock-battles, moribund codes of chivalry, and debased masculine militancy. Both
plays hold war at a distance: in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, this distance is physical, and in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, it is temporal,
for the latter play engages the romantic-chivalric values of masculine participation in war nostalgically. From the very first moments of
Much Ado, the war’s pastness, as well as its inaccessibility to the majority of the play’s characters and to the theatrical audience, is linked
to its status as off-stage. The Messenger’s account differs from the vivid eyewitness narratives of war that we find in the tragedies, such
as that of the wounded sergeant in Macbeth (c.1603-07); it is also distinct from theatrical representations of battles that are fought off-
stage but audible to a theatrical audience. These dramatic devices create an impression for the audience that military conflict is taking
place just beyond the boundaries of their vision. In Much Ado, the Messenger’s narrative draws attention to, and helps generate, a
temporal and geographic distance between the battlefront and the homefront of Messina. As in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, the war is both
an object of fascination for Messina’s courtiers and citizens and a far-off, unknown thing—an activity that claims its men and then re-
delivers them some time later in altered form.

Return implies both a coming back and a recurrence. To return is to mark a gap—or a passage of time in which change may occur—even
as it is also to repeat, to do again. Beatrice’s characterization of the young men as “returned” (1.1.30) suggests that they were in Messina
9
before, as does her recollection of a history of sparring with Benedick: “You always end with a jade’s trick: I know you of old” (1.1.114).
But the soldiers also seem to be guests—figures that are out of place and must be made to feel at home. The “great supper” (1.3.40, 66)
of Act 2, as both Borachio and Don John call it, welcomes these combatants back, marking a transition from war to peace that mirrors the
imagined, future celebratory suppers Henry V promises in his speech before the battle of Agincourt. Of the healing and celebrations of the
post-war moment, Paul Ricoeur argues that:

What we celebrate under the title of founding events are, essentially, acts of violence legitimated after the fact by a
precarious state of right. What was glory for some was humiliation for others. To celebration on one side corresponds
execration on the other. In this way, symbolic wounds calling for healing are stored in the archives of the collective memory.
More precisely, what, in historical experience, takes the form of paradox—namely, too much memory here, not enough
memory there—can be reinterpreted in terms of the categories of resistance and compulsion to repeat, and, finally, can be
found to undergo the ordeal of the difficult work of remembering.(79)

As in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, the comedic post-war moment establishes a “precarious state of right” defined by “the
difficult work of remembering.” This work is undertaken largely by the returned soldiers, who also participate in the work of comedy:
wooing and matchmaking. Benedick and Claudio’s narratives dramatize Ricoeur’s problem of “too much memory here, not enough
memory there” and direct our attention to fissures in the supposedly-bonded group of men, as well as to tensions between this group
and the homefront that receives them. By subsuming the soldiers into their society, Messina tacitly absorbs their military history and
10
transforms it into a set of values that signify for masculine character in the context of comedy. This social or “collective memory,” as
Ricoeur calls it, stands apart from the soldiers’ individual memories, which occupy an important place in the opening acts of the play and
then disappear. But Michel Foucault reminds us that war is “a permanent feature of social relations.” (110). War has no opposite,
and it does not conclude when it seems to conclude. The social relations of the post-war moment in Much Ado are fraught, and the play
suggests that the returned soldiers face a crisis in understandings of post-war masculine character. This crisis is mirrored and amplified
by Beatrice, who refuses to participate in the retrospective glorification of military service and who comes to represent the play’s fullest
challenge to masculine militant ideology.
II. Narrating Masculine Post-war Character
In non-comedic Shakespearean drama, the returned soldier has been largely understood as a figure for trauma, and critics have taken
for granted that that his subjectivity should be examined primarily in terms of repressed traumatic memories of violence. Following
Freud’s famous articulation of repressed memories in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, such an argument assumes that war must
be understood exclusively as combat and that we should read dramatic representations of soldiers as real human beings who have been
subject to this violence. Conversely, in comedic Shakespearean drama, the soldier is often a debased figure to be mocked: a miles
gloriosus borrowed from ancient Roman comedy, for example, or a foppish knight associated with the decline of chivalric values and
practices. In 3.3 of Much Ado, Borachio offers a critique of “fashion” as producing ersatz soldiers:

Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is, how giddily he turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and
five-and-thirty, sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel’s priests in
the old church window, sometimes like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems
as massy as his club?(3.3.130-38)

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His energetic digression directs our attention to three homosocial groups or figures: Pharaoh’s soldiers, Bel’s priests, and Hercules. His
reference to “the reechy painting” and “the smirched worm-eaten tapestry” (emphasis mine) suggests that these art objects are familiar to
his interlocutor Conrade and perhaps to the theatrical audience, as well. Both the painting and the tapestry depict conventional masculine
figures: Pharaoh’s soldiers and Hercules. But these soldiers are no more than preening peacocks, and the false Hercules’ enormous and
showy codpiece inspires mockery. Borachio’s model of the comedic soldier is a deformed and debased heroic figure, but this is precisely
what the play does not deliver. There are no braggarts or old soldiers here, no absurd mock-knights like Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night or
even Falstaff, no massy codpieces designed to elicit laughter. Benedick and Claudio have little in common, but they are both legitimate
12
post-war subjects: the audience is not to laugh at how they speak of the war or their soldier selves. Much Ado conceives of war not as a
violent system that is physically and psychologically damaging to the subject, but rather as a form of service that informs group and
individual masculine character in a social context. This is one of the modulations of war in the context of comedy. Indeed, the returned
soldiers are also delineated as apart from the “Prince’s watch,” (3.3.6) a comic, buffoonish pseudo-military group that is denied the heroic
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identity service confers, as well as its attendant memorial practices and husbandly potential.
As Richard A. Levin has said, “The time to marry has come to Messina” (93). In Acts 1 and 2, the returned soldiers must undergo a rapid
transition from the mandates of militant masculine homosociality to the heteronormative requirements of comedy; the work of war must be
replaced with the work of wooing. Heather Dubrow reminds us that, “Generic prescriptions … resemble social codes” (3). Indeed, these
characters have left one system (militant) in order to enter another (comedic), and they are subject to different rules and regulations in
each. Like Theseus, these characters retrospectively construct their soldier-selves while gesturing to their future civic-selves. Spurred on
by others, Claudio establishes an ambivalent willingness to play the romantic hero, and Benedick insists on his refusal of this role. His
resistance to the role of husband is bound up in his memory of the war and the militant masculine character he believes it produces. But
crucially, he does not speak of himself—he speaks of Claudio. In Act 1, he asks of Claudio, “Is ’t come to this? In faith, hath not the world
one man but he will wear his cap with suspicion? Shall I never see a bachelor of threescore again?” (1.1.186-88). The husband is
14
necessarily a cuckold, and the bachelor alone is free of the “yoke” of marriage (1.1.90). His critique of Claudio in Act 2, which is
delivered alone on stage to the theatrical audience, underscores his own unique knowledge (“I have known …”) of Claudio’s past soldierly
self and his present “turn”:

I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife, and now he had rather hear the tabor and the
pipe. I have known when he would have walked ten mile afoot to see a good armour, and now will he lie ten nights awake
carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and
now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes. May I be so converted
and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not.(2.3.12-22)

Benedick’s repetition of the phrase “I have known” indicates that he believes himself to possess a uniquely masculine, soldierly way of
knowing. Certainly, “I have known” means that he remembers, but he does not refer directly to the operations of memory. Rather, his
conception of the past is informed by the cognitive; it is intimately linked to what he knows about Claudio as a former soldier. He
implicitly understands his past soldier-self as similar to Claudio’s, but he can no longer “see” with Claudio’s eyes. This breach of
sympathy between war comrades, this failure to identify, comes with the post-war moment. What Benedick knew in the past and what he
knows in the present are diametrically opposed, and this opposition is informed by the generic mandates to which these characters must
submit. His insistent “I have known” also emblematizes his resistance to the heteronormativity that comedy demands. By praising the
Claudio of the past, Benedick levels a critique not only of the Claudio of the present, but of the system that rewards this husbandly
behavior more broadly. His speech polices the boundary between the military and the civic as not only geographical spaces, as they were
for the Messenger in Act 1, but also as cognitive ones that inform subjectivity. In other words, he tries to shore up the very divide between
war and peace that Foucault rejects: for Benedick, war produces one kind of subject, and peace another.
Furthermore, Benedick’s militant “I have known” is an “I” in isolation, for no other character articulates this nostalgic position, and the
theatrical audience has witnessed nothing to suggest that his understanding of Claudio’s character is in fact shared by others. For him,
the war is an idealized past in the context of the disruptive and disrupting world of comedy, and the past is ordered by recourse to the
language of military discipline (honestly, plainness) and by his selective memory. His rigid binaries—plain speech vs. orthography, the
drum and the fife vs. the tabor and pipe, and the good armour vs. the doublet—oppose the realms of war and peace that the play
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simultaneously posits as normative and critiques. These lines resonate with the Chorus of Henry V: “Now all the youth of England are
on fire, / And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies: / Now thrive the armourers …” (2.0.1-3). But Benedick is concerned with war and peace
not as abstracts, but as forces that shape subjectivity: Claudio has adopted the “silken dalliance” of peacetime.
Benedick’s disparaging reference to the tabor and the pipe as emblematic of the post-war moment echoes Richard III’s opening lines,
which figure the difference between war and peace aurally: “Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, / Our dreadful marches to
delightful measures” (1.1.7-8). Like Benedick, Richard envisions the soldier transitioning from the field to the boudoir, but unlike Benedick,
he imagines this transition as a desirable one. Richard III (c.1592) is generically hybrid—it is both history and comedy—and his opening
speech yokes the demands of romantic comedy to the largely war-defined narratives of the history plays. His “now” is a now of erotic
possibility, and his instrument of choice is the lute:

And now, instead of mounting barded steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
(1.1.10-13)
His embracing of the post-war moment positions him as a comic suitor, even as he acknowledges the difficulty of taking on such a role.
He anticipates his own involvement in a similarly lascivious scene even as he asserts his status as outsider and Vice figure. In Act 2,
Hero invokes the figure of the lute in reference to the Prince’s disguise at the banquet: “When I like your favor, God defend the lute
should be like the case” (2.1.92-93). Don Pedro himself characterizes his mask as a “visor” (2.1.96), a term that may refer to a military
helmet. (Jacques Derrida employs the term this way in his argument about the “visor effect” of the Ghost of King Hamlet.) Hero thus
neutralizes and pacifies the Prince’s military language (the visor becomes a lute case), absorbing him into the romantic requirements of
comedy; he is indeed one of the play’s chief architects of romance. The Prince refers to the match-making of Beatrice and Benedick as
“one of Hercules’ labours” (2.1.356), echoing Borachio’s rant about fashionable, fake soldiers and suggesting that Hercules has been
refashioned as a Pandar.

Soldierly rhetorical shifts may augur social shifts. Like his concern that Claudio has “turned orthography,” Benedick’s fear that he will “turn
husband” (1.1.183) anticipates Othello’s anxiety regarding “turn[ing] Turks” (2.3.151), for both the husband and the Turk are positioned as
apart from the practice of noble, state-sanctioned military violence. In both plays, the language of religious heresy informs this
“conversion.” In Much Ado, it is also informed by Ovidian notions of metamorphoses and by understandings of how figurative language
operates as troping or turning. To turn is necessarily to turn away from, to reposition oneself in relationship to others. As such, this kind of
turning threatens Benedick’s understanding of masculine post-war character as ideally an extension of one’s character in war. Despite
Benedick’s implication that soldierly subjectivity protects one from the mandates of comedy, the Prince believes that Benedick’s military
service suits him to the role of husband: “Benedick is not the unhopefullest husband that I know. Thus far can I praise him: he is of a
noble strain, of approved valour, and confirmed honesty” (2.2.368-70). This account of his character draws on outmoded understandings
of chivalry in suggesting that nobility, valor, and honesty are values on a continuum. In this sense, he echoes the values of Benedick’s
earlier speech about Claudio. But far from a common soldier, Benedick is here deemed a noble pseudo-knight, a figure that harkens back
to an older system that also encodes him as a worthy lover. His “valour” is “approved,” or proved, in battle, and so the Prince here
deploys the play’s war as a means of defining post-war character, and his definition is wildly at odds with Benedick’s own understanding
of himself as a perpetual soldier and “bachelor.” That Benedick proves to be a far more successful lover than Claudio suggests that the
play endorses his model of militant memory and the Prince’s definition of the values of post-war character.

As is the case with the conversions of Benedick and Beatrice in Acts 2 and 3, Claudio’s romantic “turn” occurs instantaneously, and it is
bound up in how he views the militant past. Although his supposed suitability as a husband is largely informed by his military
commendations in 1.1, he erases the war from his own narrative. In his exchange with Don Pedro on the subject of marriage to Hero, he
constructs a before-and-after scenario that renders the “wars” nothing, an absence that is bookended by meetings with his beloved:

O my lord,
When you went onward on this ended action
I looked upon her with a soldier’s eye,
That liked, but had a rougher task in hand
Than to drive liking to the name of love.
But now I am returned, and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying that I liked her ere I went to wars.
(1.1.277-86)
As Nova Myhill notes, “The way Claudio saw Hero before he went to war and the way he sees her at the start of the play seem to differ
only situationally” (293). Claudio maps out a temporality—“When,” “now,” “ere”—that erases the military conflict beyond the borders of
the play, a conflict that he also underscores as “ended.” His reference to “rooms” once filled with “war-thoughts” that are now “vacant”
invokes a medieval art of memory and suggests that his mind can be filled with thoughts of war, emptied out, and then filled with
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thoughts of love. This changeability contrasts with the consistency of Benedick’s imperfect tense: “I have known. …” For Claudio, the
war is an “action” and a “task”—a form of labor like any other—and he begins his speech not by underscoring his own military
participation, but rather the Prince’s: “When you went onward on this ended action …” (emphasis mine). He imagines his memorial self
in synecdochal form, reduced to a “soldier’s eye” that looks on its object of desire as a distraction from his war duties. His past refusal to
“drive liking to the name of love” suggests the incompatibility of the roles of (devalued, distracted) lover and (valued, focused) soldier.
And upon returning from war, he imagines himself transitioning from the “action” of the soldier to the passivity of the lover, who is acted
upon by desires that he does not control. Claudio is “prompted” by his desires.

This theatrical metaphor figures Claudio as an actor who speaks upon cue. And in fact, he does not even speak for himself: his
“delicate desires” not only prompt but say “that I liked her ere I went to wars.” At the banquet in Act 2, Beatrice echoes this language
when she tells a silent and sullen Claudio, “Speak, count, ’tis your cue” (2.1.299). He is hardly the lover that the Prince envisions in Act 1:
namely, one who “tire[s] the hearer with a book of words” (1.1.303). And of course Benedick also characterizes Claudio as “turned
orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.” Despite these repeated and conventional
formulations of the masculine lover as verbose, Claudio proves to be no such figure, and his silence, which he refers to as “the perfectest
herald of joy” (2.1.300), suggests a post-war ambivalence regarding his new civic role. Far from the excited and determined lover, Claudio
is only marginally more invested in this role than Benedick.

Perhaps ironically, Claudio’s rigid “When … now” memorial construction suggests to the Prince that he should indeed be a husband, a
desire he never himself expresses. Even Claudio’s most explicit articulation of a desire to wed underscores his inability to “trust [him]self”
as subject to his desires, as well as his past resolve to remain a bachelor. Benedick asks, “But I hope you have no intent to turn husband,
have you?” to which Claudio responds, “I would scarce trust myself, though I had sworn the contrary, if Hero would be my wife” (1.1.189-
92, emphasis mine). Claudio’s conditional mode keeps him firmly in the position of a single man, and this role can be altered only through
the actions of others. Indeed, we might note that the Prince himself is at odds with both the realms of the militaristic and the civic: he does
not narrate his participation in the past war, and although he is a dedicated romantic proxy for Claudio, he displays little interest in
marrying himself. He proposes that Hero’s wooing occur at the banquet festivities that welcome the soldiers home:

Thou wilt be like a lover presently

And tire the hearer with a book of words.
If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it,
And I will break with her and with her father,
And thou shalt have her.
(1.1.301-05)
Claudio is thus “prompted” not only by his own desires, which he figures as alien to himself and acting upon him, but also by the Prince,
whom Leonato mistakenly believes to be his daughter’s suitor. The Prince’s prediction that Claudio will be “like a lover” (emphasis mine)
furthers the performative language surrounding Claudio’s romantic undertaking. The “story” that Claudio tells—to borrow the Prince’s
term (1./1./306)—is one about a past, pre-war moment of first encountering Hero, and not about future romantic exploits. Thus if the
post-war Benedick dwells on Claudio’s war-self, Claudio operates in a pluperfect to Benedick’s past, but neither soldier looks to the
17
future, that temporality so central to romantic comedy.

Claudio’s subjectivity is predicated on the suppression, or obliteration, of his soldierly identity, and his narrative of his past dealings with
18
Hero represents the play’s fullest articulation of what it means to elide one’s participation in war. His memory of his distant, pre-war self
is inextricably linked to his forgetting of the war: he must cut out the war in order to remember his former “delicate desires” and to render
himself passively prompted by them now that he is “returned.” His present self and his tacit acceptance of the role of potential lover
proposed by the Prince require that he skip over the soldier-self that Benedick deems authentic and superior. As Adrian Poole notes “to
laugh, one must be free to forget.” Furthermore, the “theater is a place where people partly forget themselves together, on stage and in
the audience. The gathering is important for relieving the fear that you might be the only one to remember or forget” (92). The
forgetfulness of a theatrical audience might be productive. In a sense, comedy also requires forgetfulness from its characters, in contrast
to the “Remember me!” of a revenge tragedy such as Hamlet or the creation of national, communal memories so important to the history
19
plays. But Claudio’s forgetfulness of his war self mirrors his and the Prince’s problematic and threatening forgetfulness of their history
20
of conflict with Don John. By the end of Act 1, Claudio is the most eligible returned soldier, although he will of course prove to be a
21
disastrous lover. (J. R. Mulryne deemed him “unlovable,” and E. K. Chambers called him “a worm.” ) Despite the fact that Claudio does
not speak of his military service, for others this service is his defining characteristic in the opening acts of the play. He is the war’s real
hero, or Don Pedro’s “right hand” (1.3.45), and any rivalry between himself and Benedick that might arise from such commendation—
such as that between Iago and Cassio in Othello—is a non-issue, a nothing.

The marked differences between Benedick’s and Claudio’s narratives of post-war character suggest that this military conflict has failed to
produce a band of brothers defined by fellowship and shared memorial practices, as the king insists war does in Henry V. Rather, these
divergent narratives point to a problem concerning how the values of war inform masculine character, a problem that also plays out
beyond the group of returned soldiers. Harry Berger famously figured these men as a profoundly bonded homosocial group: the “Men’s
Club of Messina” (14). This understanding has been bolstered in no small part by Kenneth Branagh’s popular 1993 film, which remains
the most influential adaptation of the play. In the opening moments of the film, the returned soldiers approach the city on horseback. They
are dressed in military uniform. In a quotation from John Sturges’ 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven, they thrust their fists into the air in
a unified announcement of their victorious return, and upon arrival, they shed their torn and tattered uniforms in order to engage in joyous
group bathing that ritualistically cleanses them of unrepresented combat atrocities. When they enter the gates of Messina, they do so in a
triangular, pseudo-military formation that suggests cohesion and the sublimation of individual identity to the collective. Yet while the
soldiers arrive as a collective in the play, and are understood as such by the inhabitants of Messina, this group is hardly bonded. Much
Ado lacks the intimate masculine friendships of much of Shakespearean drama, particularly those friendships that are forged in wartime.
None of the characters articulate an affection for one another such as that between Horatio and Hamlet, Leontes and Polixenes, or even
Iago and Othello. Claudio and Benedick are opposites, not intimates, and their divergent approaches to narrating their war-selves
22
emphasize this divide. As the Prince’s favorite, Claudio is set apart, and Benedick’s “I have known” of Act 1 does not shore up militant
masculine homosociality; it splinters him from the others. Claudio’s quick and inexplicable fear that “the prince woos [Hero] for himself”
(2.1.80) at the banquet has more in common with the agonistic male struggles Coppélia Kahn identifies with the Roman plays than the
23
with the homosocial relationships of comedy. And Don John’s status as menacing Other—and his surprising effectiveness—
24
underscores the fragility of the central male unit, not its strength.

III. Consuming Masculine Post-war Character

Although the soldiers are welcomed with open arms by most, the play allows for one powerful dissenting voice—that of Beatrice—that
further complicates post-war masculine character in the play. Paul Jorgensen argues that Shakespeare stages a pervasive cultural anxiety
regarding “the serious problem presented by the Elizabethan veteran” (209). Of Othello and Coriolanus, he notes that, “Upon returning
from the wars, these men clash with society in ways that significantly reveal their own limitations of character and also the flaws of the
25
social group to which they return” (208). Such clashes are present in Much Ado, as well. The returned soldiers’ communally-accepted
heroism is compromised by Beatrice’s dismissive and critical response to narratives of masculine battlefield prowess, which she
articulates as a desire to eat soldiers. Simply put, Beatrice wants to eat Benedick, the man that remembers, and Claudio, the man that
forgets, and her cannibalistic discourse constitutes a figurative attempt to obliterate post-war masculine character. It is appropriate that her
challenge to these returned soldiers should take the form of an obsession with consumption, given the resonances in early modern
England between eating and the destruction of men in war. In Henry IV, Part 1 (1597), which was written around the same time as Much
Ado, Falstaff figures his soldiers as food when Hal observes, “I did never see such pitiful rascals” (4.2.65): “Tut, tut, good enough to toss;
food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men” (4.2.66-68). This image of soldiers
as “food for powder” represents a culmination of the language of eating and drinking that runs through the scene. These soldiers are
“toasts-and-butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins’ heads …” (4.2.21-22). Falstaff also imagines himself as food: “If I be not
ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet” (4.2.11-12). In his relentless voiding out of the value of human life in the context of
combat, Falstaff represents one of the chief critics of war in the Henry IV plays, as well as one of the darkest and, at times, the most
ethically compromised. At the end of this scene, he looks forward to a post-battle feast that eerily doubles his vision of his soldiers as “food
26
for powder”: “Well, / To the latter end of a fray and the beginning of a feast / Fits a dull fighter and a keen guest” (4.2.80-83). His vision is
shadowed by a language of cannibalism that collapses the battle and the banquet into sites of consumption. The loss of life generated by
combat both literally and figuratively generates feasts. Of another famously cannibalistic woman—namely, Desdemona and her
devouringly “greedy ear” (1.3.150) in Othello—Dennis Austin Britton notes that her “participation in the larger European consumption of
other cultures through travel narratives, a consumption that metaphorically links Europeans to the cannibals that are so often described in
the narratives themselves, creates an elision between figurative and literal eating that suggests similarity between Europeans and
cannibals” (33). We witness a similar elision in the banquet scene in Act 2 of Much Ado, when Benedick protests that Beatrice is “a dish I
love not!” (2.1.269). But Benedick does not realize that Beatrice controls the potential for cannibalism in the play.

In 1.1, she is the most vocal audience to the Messenger’s report of the war. By challenging the Messenger’s, Claudio’s uncle’s, and
Leonato’s reactions to news of the returned soldiers, she presents a critique of the soldier that threatens to dissolve any connection
27
between military service and husbandly potential. She asks after Benedick: “I pray you, is Signor Mountanto returned from the wars?”
(1.1.28-29). This ironic reference to Benedick as “Signor Mountanto” (1.1.28) neutralizes the threat of military violence by implying that
Benedick is a fashionable fencer rather than a legitimate combatant. In her request for a report of Benedick’s battlefield performance, she
positions herself as a consumer of enemy soldiers: “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he
killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing” (1.1.39-42). Here, Beatrice links cannibalism to poor military service. Robert Ornstein
notes that, “Her joking about Benedick’s good service at the officers’ mess is amusing enough, but she will not admit that her mockery of
his valor is a jest, and she refuses to credit the messenger’s report of his bravery” (125). But Ornstein assumes that a “jest” cannot
constitute a legitimate critique of valor. It is precisely by jesting that Beatrice resists “credit[ing]” the Messenger’s report in both the literal
and figurative sense: certainly, she does not necessarily believe him, but more importantly, she views his glorification of the feats
performed on this absent battlefield with suspicion. She is skeptical that Benedick is an effective soldier (which is to say, that he has killed
people), and so her cannibalistic “promise” to eat his killings is emptied of any real danger. Leonato tells Beatrice that Benedick will “be
meet with you” (1.1.44). His pun on “meet” and “meat” (as well as possibly “mate”) shifts the focus of the exchange from the battlefield to
the boudoir, and his suggestion that Beatrice will sate her sexual appetite on Benedick’s flesh refigures her threat as a pleasure for both.
In fact, Leonato’s intervention recodes all that follows as necessarily sexual rather than militaristic, a shift that mirrors the play’s own
comedic foregrounding of the romantic. Read in this light, the Messenger’s confident reply that, “He [Benedick] hath done good service,
lady, in these wars” (1.1.45-6) reasserts the relevance of combat for masculine post-war character and situates military service in
dialogue with other services, presumably erotic, that Benedick will provide. But Beatrice’s reply—“You had musty victual, and he hath
holp to eat it. He is a very valiant trencher-man: he hath an excellent stomach” (1.1.47-49)—refigures the soldier as consumable. As a
pun on “musters,” or the assessment of the availability of local militia, “musty” invokes leftovers and leftover men. By imagining
Benedick’s “nothing” of battlefield killings as gluttony and excess of appetite (“he hath an excellent stomach”), and by suggesting that he
has been feasting on moldy meat, she transforms his military participation into a gruesome feast on bad meat, and in so doing she
implicitly positions herself as a superior—but unavailable—dish.

Beatrice’s vision of a cannibalistic battlefield threatens both Benedick’s soldierly body and the promises of romantic comedy, for this body
should be positioned to marry and procreate. Far from a “merry war of the sexes” in which the violence of war is refracted into the
figurative violence of discourse, the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is actually an encounter between antagonists founded in
an ideological difference in their views of the returned soldier and manifested in a fixation on consumption. Of Troilus and Cressida, a
comedy that focuses more obviously on war, David Hillman argues that, “The play thrusts both its protagonists and the audience back
28
into the body, recorporealizing the epic of the Trojan War” (296). Hillman’s attention to how the play’s romantic and military plots are
bound up in bodily appetites resonates with Beatrice’s own appetite for the soldiers that surround her. When the Messenger asserts that
Benedick is “a good soldier too, lady,” Beatrice revises this assertion as “a good soldier to a lady; but what is he to a lord?” (1.1.50-51).
Her bawdy quibble foregrounds the homoerotics of the battlefield and suggests that the chief relationships in this play are, and will
continue to be, those between lords and lords, not between lords and ladies.

Read as a violation of man against man, the supposed cuckolding of Claudio by Borachio perpetuates the domestic refiguration of
masculine battlefield struggles. By encoding Benedick as a cannibal-sodomite, Beatrice initiates this refiguration by rejecting the
Messenger’s and Leonato’s sexual jokes that would prematurely render her a wife. In so doing, she appeals to a very real early modern
29
anxiety regarding masculine friendship and sodomy, both in and out of war. What indeed is Benedick to a lord? Very little, it would
seem, as the play fails to show the masculine intimacy about which she quibbles. In her first encounter with Benedick and the other
returned soldiers, Beatrice figures herself as perpetually sustained by his body:

Benedick
What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?

Beatrice

Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to
disdain if you come in her presence.

(1.1.116-19)

Here, his “meat” is “meet,” or appropriate, to her disdain of him; his very presence increases her desire to feed her dislike. Her reference
to “conver[sion]” in the presence of the opposite sex also anticipates Benedick’s anxiety regarding Claudio’s “turning” husband. Courtly
“courtesy” should govern Beatrice’s behavior, as she acknowledges, but this mode of social interaction is displaced, as is Benedick’s
gendered designation of her as “Lady Disdain,” which she corrects as simply “disdain.” In Act 2, he will call her “my Lady Tongue,”
(2.1.270) a term that collapses female speech and consumption.

In Act 4, she teases Benedick that one may eat words as well as human subjects:

Benedick

By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me!

Beatrice

Do not swear and eat it.

Benedick

I will swear by it that you love me, and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.
Beatrice

Will you not eat your word?

Benedick

With no sauce that can be devised for it.

(4.1.287-93)

Beatrice resists the ideological power of the masculine, militant “sword” in this exchange. Although Benedick insists on swearing by his
sword—he repeats, “I will swear by it that you love me” (emphasis mine)—she fears that he will recant, or “eat” his words. He then
envisions a third party consuming said words—“and I will make him eat it that says I love not you”—but she insists on the eating of “your
word” (emphasis mine), a practice that he resists. Ultimately, Benedick pushes back against this role as a consumer of words, and
Beatrice reclaims it for herself, refiguring consumption as a physical and bodily form of revenge. Moments later, in response to his refusal
to revenge Hero’s slander by killing Claudio, she exclaims:

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, uncovered slander, unmitigated
rancour? O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.(4.1.300-05)

Her desire to “eat his heart in the marketplace” redirects our attention to the question of ritual—both military and civic—in the context of
comedy. Bertrand Evans has maintained that Much Ado, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and The Merry Wives of Windsor are all
“compact of practices, practisers, and practisees”: “The primary features common to these worlds, are, at the one extreme, an
extraordinary alacrity of the inhabitants in initiating practices, and, at the other, an extraordinary susceptibility to the practices of their
fellows” (68). Indeed, the threat of cannibalism pervades the play: Beatrice also imagines Don John as a dish that gives heartburn
(2.1.4), and Don John figures his destructive plotting as “food to my displeasure” (1.3.61). In early modern England, the practice of
cannibalism was associated with the supposed brutality of the new world, a notion that Montaigne rejects in his famous essay “On
Cannibalism,” as well as with the old world, or a pre-Reformation cultural moment, for anti-Catholic tracts often imagined the
Eucharist as a form of cannibalism. But for Montaigne, cannibalism is not a primitive practice of the racialized Other; it is a metaphor for
the violence of the European. In this sense, Montaigne has much in common with Beatrice, for he, too, imagines the practice of
cannibalism as a way of understanding the immediate world, not an exotic space or place of otherness. The most famous staging of
cannibalism in the Shakespearean canon is the dinner party at the end of Titus Andronicus (c.1588-93), but other references abound,
such as the Constable’s critique of the Dauphin’s soldierly self in Henry V: “I think he will eat all he kills” (3.7.94). Hamlet observes that,
“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm,” by which he means to illustrate for
Claudius “how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.24-27). In all these cases, cannibalism is rendered a banal
and everyday activity. It is also associated with the comical and the humorous.
But if Much Ado modulates the representation of war and soldierly habitus in deference to genre, it also modulates Beatrice’s desire to
eat soldiers. Raymond Rice maintains that her cannibalistic impulses are circumscribed by the community in which she plays a role:
Beatrice’s frustration with her inability to act, however, is not merely a byproduct 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. … [H]er gender will not
allow for a matter-ization 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 plays’
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authority figures—but she cannot enact them.(300)

But it is problematic to relegate speech to an inherently inferior position to action—particularly in a play in which language is so
consistently figured as violent action. Her cannibalistic revenge fantasy is controlled not only by “her recognition of the limit of her
subjectivity as a woman constituted as such by her culture,” but also by Benedick’s nominal re-alignment with his fellow soldier Claudio.
By rejecting her request to “kill Claudio,” Benedick demonstrates his investment in curbing female attempts to cannibalize the darlings of
this fractured group of returned soldiers. He is not necessarily so “sympathetic” to Beatrice’s plight as Rice assumes. For Beatrice,
Claudio’s guilt is “approved,” and in imagining it as such, she deploys a military metaphor of proof—or the testing of the strength and
impenetrability of steel in battle—that runs through the play. This new mode of proof displaces Claudio’s proof of personal worth in battle,
which signifies nothing for Beatrice. Don Pedro says of Hero that, “on my honour she was charged with nothing / But what was true and
very full of proof” (5.1.104-05). His unwitting “nothing”/“full” paradox suggests that the masculine proof of cuckolding required in the civic
sphere, or what Othello calls “ocular proof” (3.3.365), is an illegitimate and perverted mode of proof that stands in contrast to the proof of
the battlefield. Ultimately, Claudio is forced to occupy the very social role he spoke of with such ambivalence in his earlier musings on his
antebellum and wartime selves. Beatrice’s fantasy of consuming his heart is displaced by the communal plot of his second wedding, which
reprimands him for his earlier rejection of Hero and rewards him for his obsequious sorrow at her loss. The language of doubling that
defines the end of the play—Claudio’s second chance at wedded bliss and Hero’s doubling of herself that enables this fantasy to come to
fruition—constitutes an expansion of the play’s preoccupation with the subjective doubles that war produces. Hero’s “And when I lived, I
was your other wife, / And when you loved, you were my other husband” (5.4.61-62, emphasis mine) returns us to how time is imagined in
this comedy: her double “when” echoes Claudio’s “ere” of his own narrative of his pre- and post-war selves in Act 2. And Benedick’s earlier
assertion that Claudio was one thing during the war and another after is further developed in Act 5 as Claudio must generate another,
repentant subjectivity in order to reenter the domain of romantic comedy from which his earlier violence against Hero excluded him.
Beatrice’s consuming mouth is also controlled by her own anticipated marriage—itself a double of Claudio and Hero’s—and thus her
absorption into the play’s dominant comedic ideology. Benedick’s “Peace! I will stop your mouth” (5.4.101) not only silences her, a
phenomenon shared with many other Shakespearean comedies, but also closes down the possibility that she will further threaten the
unstable figure of the returned soldier by trying to eat him. But her cannibalistic language nonetheless underscores the “precarious state of
right” Ricoeur associates with a fraught post war moment. This “precarious state of right” is necessarily masculine, and like all patriarchal
structures, it requires the participation of the play’s female characters. Beatrice’s challenge to this structure is modulated and ultimately
controlled by comedy, but it exists. By representing an alternative to the play’s welcoming homefront, she suggests that comedy is an
important genre for complicating the values assigned to post-war character in early modern England.

Notes
1. In my definition of the play’s various “nothings,” I am influenced by Terry Eagleton’s well-known argument about nothings in
Shakespeare. He notes that, “If the female nothing were a simple absence, it would pose no problem; but there is in fact no simple
absence, since all absence is dependent for its perceptibility on presence. It is, then, a void which cannot help being powerfully
suggestive, a nothing in the sense of rien rather than of neant” (64-65).

2. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, to “modulate” in music means to vary the tone, pitch, or strength of sound; it can also refer
to a change in key. More generally, and in an extra-musical sense, “modulate” designates an attempt to regulate something in a certain
measure or proportion—perhaps one’s behavior or self-presentation. I find the term’s dual sense of alter and regulate useful for my
purposes, for it underscores how pressure (in this case, the pressures of genre) may be applied to a given element (the representation of
dramatic post-war masculine character).

My use of the term “modulate” thus departs from Stephen Greenblatt’s understanding of Shakespeare’s “negotiations”—or his
engagement with the disparate discursive social realms of his day—as productive of plays defined by “social energy” (3). These cultural
negotiations were crucial to the development of a theater that was bound up in pleasure and affect but, as Greenblatt argues, they pose a
challenge to the critic as they have been obscured by the passage of time. His project is recuperative; he attempts to recover these
negotiations. My investment is not so much in how Shakespeare’s negotiations of social and cultural forces might shape the
representation of masculine post-war character in Much Ado, but rather in how genre does. The term “modulation” is narrower than
“negotiation,” for it implies restriction, not dynamic freedom, on the part of the dramatist. To modulate is to generate modes of
representation that are virtually mandated by genre.

In my attention to comedy, I also depart from many fine contemporary studies of Shakespeare and war that take the historical context of
actual wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as their focus. While these real conflicts no doubt informed the
representation of militarism on the Shakespearean stage, it is equally important to attend to what genre enables and disables with
regards to the representation of war.

3. My understanding of character and subjectivity is informed by Linda Charnes’ work on “the relationship between subjectivity and the
social” (13). I am also influenced by Cynthia Marshall, who attends to the extent to which early modern English texts registered the
shattering and dissolving of selves, or what she refers to as “the Renaissance impulse to negate selfhood” (4). On pre-modern and
early modern cultural understandings of subjectivity in relationship to the violence of combat, see Feather.

4. My argument about war and character in Much Ado is in some ways in dialogue with the now-classic critical conversations about dark
comedies or Shakespearean “problem plays,” to use F. S. Boas’ term, and “tragicomedies,” to use John Fletcher’s. In his 1896 work
Shakespeare and His Predecessors, Boas famously identified All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida,
and Hamlet as “problem plays,” a term that suggested that these plays failed to conform to generic mandates regarding
tone and subject matter (3). For Boas, such a failure to conform led to problems with categorization. Since then, the term “problem play”
has been applied to The Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens, among other plays. Fletcher’s definition of
tragicomedy is as follows: “A tragicomedy is so called not in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect that it wants deaths, which is
enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy” (497). Certainly, given Hero’s feigned
death, this definition might be applied to Much Ado. For a breakdown of the early, middle, and late “problem” comedies of Shakespeare,
see Mikesell. And for more on the complex relationship between tragedy and comedy, see Frye, who focuses on tragedy in comedy, and
Snyder, who focuses on comedy in tragedy. Henri Bergson’s understanding of the comic is also more capacious that Boas’ and allows for
the coexistence of light and dark elements. Certainly, examinations of the darker elements of comedy have tended to foreground the
question of violence. The seminal studies of comedy and holiday have likewise tended to concentrate on the disruptive elements of
comedy, both to an individual and to a society as a whole, without considering more completely how comedy regulates and controls
representation. See Bakhtin; Bristol; and Laroque.

5. For other examinations of war on the Shakespearean stage, see Jorgensen; Hale; Bowen; Murrin; Meron; Somogyi; Breight;
Baker; Pugliatti; Taunton; and Cahill.

6. There is such a wealth of material on Shakespearean comedy that I will simply note several important works here. Certainly, comedy
maps and interrogates the daily—or what Michel de Certeau calls “the practice of everyday life.” In his study of the “precariously
contingent status of the comic moment” in Shakespeare, R. W. Maslen maintains that, “the comic was regarded in Shakespeare’s time
as fundamentally indefinable, and comedy as a highly slippery theatrical phenomenon” (5). He also argues that “aggression plays a key
role in [Shakespeare’s] first experiments with the comic” and that the “merry war” of the sexes in Much Ado displaces the concluded war
(39). Lynne Magnusson also notes the extent to which Shakespearean comedy foregrounds social structures: “Comedy is perhaps the
literary genre most explicitly concerned with people’s behavior within social formations, and Shakespeare’s excellence as a comic
dramatist—no matter what he brings from the learned arts of rhetoric and logic, the dramatic conventions of Italy, Greece, and Rome,
and the literary artifices of Lyly and Ovid—depends on his keen observation of how language works in actual social contexts” (159).

7. Heather James’ reading of Troilus and Cressida is one of the best sustained inquiries into the representation of war in early modern
English comedy. See also Barker on militarism and non-militarism in The Shoemakers’ Holiday in chapter 7 of War and Nation.
Somogyi treats several comedies in Shakespeare’s Theatre of War: “It is not … only in Tragical Histories that war casts its shadow, as
reference to Shakespeare’s Comedies confirms. Whether reflected in the military societies in which they are set (Much Ado About
Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well); in the intrusions on to conventionally comedic, domestic settings (the prince of Morocco in The
Merchant of Venice, Falstaff’s band in Windsor); or in the flickerings of contemporary allusion in a name (Berowne, Dumaine, Navarre
in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Don John in Much Ado), the ‘smoake of warre’ is never far away (Twelfth Night, 5.1.49)” (6-7).

8. Julia Gaspar notes that the representation of war in France would likely have resonated with current military engagements—and in
particular with Essex’s campaigns in Ireland (16). In this sense, the play’s war is both remote (on the level of representation) and
immediate (in its echoes of contemporary events in the moment of performance). David Scott Kastan argues that Thomas Dekker’s The
Shoemakers’ Holiday effectively controls the destructive capacity of war: “Rafe’s safe return, after he has been reported dead, is a
welcome fantasy of wish-fulfillment for a nation wearied and worried by war” (330). And like Much Ado, The Shoemakers’ Holiday
foregrounds questions of memory and war. As Alison A. Chapman has noted, the “remaking of festal observance” (1468) in Dekker’s play
and in Henry V is a chief means by which the plays control the communal memory of military victories like the one that opens Much Ado.
9. Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean comedy, Much Ado has inspired in critics a desire to create a pre-history to the play, but
this pre-history is romantic, not militaristic, and generally concerns the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick. As Joost Daalder
maintains, “an Elizabethan audience watching the play attentively may well have conjectured that at some stage in the past Benedick
aimed to make Beatrice fall in love with him, and that he succeeded. She, for her part, did not manage to inspire quite the same emotion
in him. That became evident, it seems, when he showed disloyalty to her after initially pledging his faith to her. He withdrew from his
contact with her, and thereafter sought male company instead” (524). The war thus becomes no more an escape from bad romantic
behavior, a space into which Benedick may leave Beatrice in favor of “male company.”

10. Alison Landsberg examines how cultures remember events that they did not actually experience, a phenomenon she identifies as
“prosthetic memory.”

11. In my definition of homosociality here and in this article as a whole, I follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on “the affective social
force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important
relationship” (18).

12. Karen Newman argues that Benedick is a miles gloriosus: “His boasting of success with women and his martial reputation connect
him to the miles tradition just as Claudio’s language and actions have connected him to the tradition of the courtly lover … But unlike the
Plautine braggart, Benedick is truly a martial hero and his engagement to Beatrice to fight Claudio is real. In Benedick, Shakespeare has
created an individual character who is also a comic type, a talent for which we should remember Donatus and other commentators praise
Terence” (117).

13. In the sixteenth century, a “watch” suggested the continued lookout of vigilant guards; the term “watch” and “sentinel” were
essentially interchangeable, and a sentinel was a military position. Hamlet opens with such sentinels, but a non-military figure might
also “stand sentinel,” as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when a Fairy commands, “Hence, away! Now all is well: / One aloof stand
sentinel” (2.2.32-33).

14. This is an example of what Mark Breitenberg refers to as “anxious masculinity.” He argues that, “Masculine subjectivity
constructed and sustained by a patriarchal culture—infused with patriarchal assumptions about power, privilege, sexual desire, the body—
inevitably engenders varying degrees of anxiety in its male members” (1). In this moment, we see Benedick struggling with the extent to
which comedy, the system in which he is obligated to participate, places sexual desire and the body front and center.

15. As Sarah Cole argues, “To consider people in their relation to war is, almost inevitably, to think in categorical and binary terms—
combatant and civilian, men and women, young and old, injured and healthy, prewar and postwar, enemy and friend. And yet, as the
trajectory from classical to contemporary war protagonists so clearly shows, to consider people in their relation to war is, equally
inevitably, to see these categories disintegrating and losing their force. … [W]ar smashes apart and rearranges its human participants”
(25).

16. On the medieval art of memory, see Bolzoni; Carruthers; Carruthers Ziolkowski; and Yates.

17. Marjorie Garber argues the following of the relationship between genre and time: “if the history plays are saturated in the language of
prophecy, comedy presents a different model of time—one that is equally deterministic, but that moves towards another goal. If marriage
is the object of romantic comedy, it is the comedic equivalent of the rise of the Tudors in a historical context. Like all theatrical genres,
comedy is constrained and restrained by time and by conventions, both social and generic” (305).

18. Recent work on memory has attended to “the gaps and distortions inherent in recapturing the past” (Fara and Patterson 1).
Characters in Shakespearean drama often say that they have forgotten things. Jonas Barish identifies Caius Martius’ memory lapse
regarding his benefactor’s name in 1.9 of Coriolanus as “the tendentious forgetfulness motivated by repression” and further maintains that
he “can find no other instance in Shakespeare in which such an unmistakable, unequivocal failure of recollection takes place. … In most
cases, forgetting comes down to a refusal to remember, a conscious act of denial, often a self-serving shutting out of something
inconvenient or unwelcome” (215). Garrett A. Sullivan reminds us that memory are forgetting are “conceptually inseparable” in the English
Renaissance and notes of the writings of La Primaudaye that, “Forgetting entails not merely the loss of memory traces, it also clears a
space for and initiates a fresh act of judgment; it is the precondition for something new being done. Moreover, this act of judgment need
not be construed as the simple repetition of what forgetting has effaced, for the process of re exercising judgment always leaves open the
possibility of a different conclusion” (47).

19. There has been some very fine work on the role of memory in the wars of the history plays. Jonathan Baldo argues of Henry V that,
“What has gone largely unremarked … is the extent to which nationalist ideology and resistances to it take the form of collisions over
memory. Memory is the larger, moveable battlefield to which King Henry, England, and Elizabeth, England’s last Tudor monarch, were
repeatedly called to arms” (133).

20. Don John comes to Messina as a prisoner of war. Barbara Everett identifies a historical corollary for him, which suggests that his
name would likely have invoked ambivalent audience feelings about Spain: “The opening words of the drama speak of the distinguished
visitor by his Spanish title—he is ‘Don Peter of Arragon’; and his brother Don John’s title can hardly fail to remind an Elizabethan
audience of that Don John of Austria who was similarly a Spaniard, a natural son of Philip II. Oddly enough, it as at the port of Messina
that the fleets gathered before the great battle of Lepanto, where ‘Don John of Austria’ rode ‘to the wars.’ Catholic Spain was at Lepanto
the defender of what Renaissance Christians held to be true civilization against the barbarian hoardes of the East. But she was also the
lasting, unchanging threat to English supremacy at sea—and she represented a Church thought by many Protestant Elizabeth’s subjects
to be wickedly authoritarian: a double-face, as the play’s courtliness will shift between light and dark” (77-8). Shakespeare’s association
of the Mediterranean with conflict stands in for more explicit military details in the play; this sense of a Mediterranean conflict does a
significant amount of dramatic work. For a reading of how the Messenger’s report in Act 1 performs a “displacement of things Spanish,”
see Moison 178.

21. See Mulryne 18; and Chambers 134.

22. As Philip West reminds us, “Shakespeare was interested not only in the language of war, but in the way it is shaped by the
aftermath and the telling of stories about the events of war” (104).

23. See Kahn, particularly the Introduction and chapter 4.

24. For a succinct reading of community versus outsiders in Renaissance comedy, see Liebler, who observes that, “Renaissance
comedy asks what communal harmony is worth” (250).

25. On the soldier’s “prolonged friction with society” (265) and the trope of soldier-as-lover in Shakespeare, see also Jorgensen,
Chapter 6: “The Soldier in Society.” And for a fine examination of the figure of the returned solider, see Somogyi, Chapter 1:
“Casualties of War” and Chapter 5: “Ghosts of War.”

26. For a fine reading of the soldiers as “marked for death,” see Pasupathu 338. For more on the question of Falstaff’s comic but
“censurable” military conduct, see Bulman. And on the language of food in Shakespeare’s plays, see Fitzpatrick’s Renaissance Food and
Food in Shakespeare, as well as Chamberlain.

27. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, war takes men away from their husbandly roles; in Much Ado, it suits them to this role, at least according
to the patriarchal figures that run Messina. But the play’s representation of women in relationship to war is in some way ambivalent. Pasi
Loman maintains that, “it can be justifiably argued that Aristophanes’s female character are not, in fact, pacifists per se. They did, of
course, want the war to be stopped, but this was not for humanitarian or ideological reasons. What drove Lysistrata to initiate the sex
strike, with the view that this would force the en to end the war, was her wish to bring her husband back home” (36). This argument has
implications for the relevance of the war in the play, for if it is simply the absence of the men that is at stake, any activity that took them
from home would be equally objectionable. The position of the woman in relationship to the polis is an ambivalent one in Greek comedy
and tragedy, as many critics have noted. Supposedly sequestered in the realm of the private and
domestic (the oikos), female characters often intrude into public, political life. For more on how these female interventions do not
“result in the destruction of the interests of either public or private spheres but in peace and a return to the status quo—marriage—and
sexual relations,” see Foley 5. For an analysis of the structure of Renaissance comedy in relationship to classical forms, see
Levenson. See also H. B. Charlton’s argument that classical comedy is conservative, exposition-oriented, and satiric while
Shakespearean comedy is romantic, poetic, and imaginative (13).

28. Hillman further notes that, “Time here is repeatedly personified—an all-consuming scavenger, a thief snatching at scarps of history
with which to cram up his thievery, a vulture pounding on the leftovers of every human deed. And as ‘raging appetite’ is imagined as
the origin of both the love plot and the war plot, this same appetite is figured as the terminus of all action, the universal wolf which last
eats up itself” (299).

29. See Bray on “the uncompromising symmetry” (40) between the masculine friend and the “sodomite” in Renaissance England.

30. J. A. Bryant has also noted that Beatrice is in many ways outside of the play’s central action: “as an orphan [Beatrice] belongs to the
limbo of those whose status, or lack of it, precludes full identification with the society in which they happen to live” (127).

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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning

Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Harlan, Susan. "‘Returned from the Wars’: Comedy and Masculine Post-war Character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing."
Shakespearean Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 167, Gale, 2016. Gale Literature Resource Center,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420120991/GLS?u=j015910&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=ce4ca3dc. Accessed 9 May 2022. Originally
published in Upstart, 24 June 2013, p. n. pag..
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420120991