Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice, Benedick, and the War of Wit

Beatrice and Benedick spend the play’s first act insulting each other with a speed and precision that makes clear, long before either admits it, that they’ve been doing this for years and enjoying it more than either will confess. Shakespeare invented, in this pair, the template for centuries of will-they-won’t-they romantic comedy: two people whose sharpest weapon against attraction is wit, deployed as both flirtation and defense.

The trick their friends play — each tricked separately into overhearing that the other is secretly in love — works because it gives both characters permission to want something they’d never have admitted to wanting unprompted. Shakespeare understood that pride, not indifference, is usually the real obstacle in a love story.

It runs alongside a much darker plot, Hero’s public humiliation at her own wedding, that the comedy has to work hard to metabolize — a reminder that even Shakespeare’s lightest plays rarely stay purely light for long.

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