Chapter 5 - Masculine Virtù and Feminine Virtue in Much Ado About Nothing

Summary

The enduring popularity of Much Ado About Nothing suggests that we, the public, make much of Shakespeare's characters indeed. The play can easily be considered one of Shakespeare's top ten scripts, and the castings of Benedick and Beatrice suggest that they are part of the play's success. With A-list actors such as Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson or television stars David Tennant and Catherine Tate portraying these bantering lovers, one gets a sense of not only the importance of these characters, but also their popularity. Despite the brutal depiction of the consequences of the cult of chastity, in which a villain's word can bring dishonour and death to a virtuous woman, audiences still delight in the ‘kind of merry war betwixt’ the two avowed bachelors (1.1.57). It is not star power alone that brings spectators to these performances of Shakespeare's witty couple on stage and film, but the depiction of something greater, a love story founded in what I will term ‘virtue virtuosa’ – a performance of ingenuity, strength and fidelity that transcends and transforms the stifling patriarchal structure of Messina.

The engagement of Hero and Claudio highlights the tension inherent in the social conditions of court life by contrasting the behaviours that early modern society idealised for each gender: latent virtues such as chastity, modesty, obedience and fidelity for women, and the more active quality of virtù, a combination of strength, ingenuity, talent and other abilities for men. Early modern social constructs did not restrict all these qualities to one gender or the other, but certain aspects were deemed more important for women than men, and vice versa. For women, the virtue of chastity was elevated above all else. The priority of chastity as the primary feminine virtue is seen in Juan Luis Vives's chapter ‘On Virginity’ in The Education of a Christian Woman, as well as Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is alluded to using the Italian terms ‘onestà’ (honesty) and ‘continenzia’ (temperance or self-restraint).