Surface Tensions: Ceremony and Shame in Much Ado About Nothing

Summary

Beatrice and Benedick ‘never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them’ (1.1.60–1), we are warned, and their encounter a few lines later does not disappoint:

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

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

Ben. Then is courtesy a turn-coat: but it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted…

(1.1.112–19)

This greeting brilliantly captures the ceremonial idiom central to the social politics of Much Ado About Nothing. Both characters overplay deferential formality in their use of titles, ‘Lady Disdain’ and ‘Signor Benedick’, while simultaneously flouting the code of politeness in their insults. The satirical effect would be increased by appropriate courteous gestures of greeting: a formal bow from Benedick and an answering curtsey from Beatrice traverse the space between their bodies. Their ‘skirmish of wit’ immediately establishes Messina as a high-risk environment for face-to-face interactions, something that the tragi-comic extremes of the plot go on to demonstrate.

In the public, courtly environment of Leonato's household, identity is highly dependent on superficial signifiers and interactions. Benedick draws attention to both verbal and non-verbal surfaces in the play, pointedly warning his friends ‘The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments, and the guards [decorations] are but slightly basted on, neither’ (1.1.268–70).