Much About Nothing Marriage Analysis

In Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing, written in the early 15th century, the relationships between Benedick and Beatrice and Hero and Claudio are the key to the play and create a lot of tension and comedy. The two relationships are interesting in different ways, and this essay will explore this in terms of the language used, the plot, characterisation and how the two relationships stand thematically.

If Claudio and Hero can be accepted as the perfect models of courtly love, than Beatrice and Benedick's love is easily proven as a flawless example of true love both through an understanding of their characters as well as their interaction.  Benedick, a young lord of Padua, is, like Claudio, a gallant gentleman, but this is where their similarities cease.  Benedick is baffled by the emotions which seize him

Benedick’s attitude to love & marriage in ‘‘Much Ado About Nothing’’ In the play ‘‘Much Ado About Nothing’’ by William Shakespeare, the character of Benedick shows mixed emotions towards loves and marriage throughout. In the two extracts we studied, Benedick shows a large contrast of opinions: In Act 1 Scene 1, Benedick portrays strong feelings of contempt towards love and marriage, whereas by Act 2 Scene 3, Benedick has completely changed his views and he is prepared to make the commitment and marry Beatrice, a woman he appeared to dislike in the beginning of the play and who seemed to have mutual feelings towards Benedick. Act 1 Scene 1 portrays that Benedick has a very negative attitude towards love and marriage. When conversing with

In Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare uses Claudio and Hero to showcase the original ways of marriage and uses Benedick and Beatrice in order to show and untraditional way of love and marriage.

Through rich imagery and a comic context Shakespeare uses characters to explore his ideas about love and marriage, using relationships to show the trials of love. In his play Shakespeare makes Beatrice and Benedick the critics of love and through them the modern audience is shown how Elizabethan society maltreats the female role and how the male code of honour and pride can lead to devastation.

  Much Ado About Nothing raises many important issues concerning the institution of marriage. Perhaps Shakespeare's purpose in writing this play was to question the existing approach to relationships and marriage. Shakespeare reveals the faults of the process through the characters of Hero and Claudio and also Hero's father, Leonato. Shakespeare also may be suggesting an alternative approach to marriage and relationships through the characters of Beatrice and Benedick.

(I assume the main “couples” are Hero/Claudio and Beatrice/Benedict) The two couple are different in many ways. Hero, a young, cheerful, dreamer, is head over heels in love and wishes noting more than for her perfect fantasy to play out. It is clear throughout the story that she is “naïve” to Beatrice’s “wisdom” on the matter of love. Hero holds a very fantasy based mind of “everything works out for love” while Beatrice holds the idea of the “cynic” or “realist” and puts little to know faith in the notion of “love.” The men hold a somewhat similar ideal. They both have the same mind set as the women whom they love. Benedict indulges in the cynical mind of Beatrice as he in turn plays witty games, and Claudio resembles Hero’s ideal of prince charming and Cinderella. The two couples show “Disney” vs “reality” between them.

Claudio and Hero's views of love are very different to Beatrice and Benedick's, as they both vowed that they will never marry at the beginning of the play. Their relationship starts with witty insults as they were trying to deceive themselves that they do not love the other. However, they seem to throw their beliefs about love away as soon as they hear about someone loving them. “Here comes Beatrice. By this day, she’s a fair lady. I do spy some marks of love in her,” (2, 3, 244-246) this line shows how Benedick loves for Beatrice, and that he was trying to hide this love by always criticizing her. “And Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,

Much Ado about Nothing predominately revolves around the endeavours of two couples, the younger of which in more distinction; Claudio and Hero. As many could say that another element of Shakespearean comedies could be love, it would seem a more defined term is the love between two younger people, this young couple in particular then faces hindrances that are thrown their way, eventually working through them. Whereas there is still Beatrice and Benedick who work to overcome their egomaniacal ways and eventually initiate a romance, it would seem Claudio and Hero’s complications seem to have more significance to the storyline of the play. This is also due to the fact that the elements of comedy and key plot points are in relation to their complications, such as being the younger couple and facing the mistaken identity ordeal. Nevertheless, Hero and Claudio, being the young couple, face a string of tribulations in which define them as a couple, the majority of these, come from Don John’s

“In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady ever I looked on.” Again this really highlights the attraction Claudio has for Hero is purely the result of, first, physical beauty and, second, the desire to marry a noble and virtuous woman. While Claudio can’t be faulted for desiring such qualities in a wife, it is telling that he is ready to marry her after only this first meeting and that he goes to Leonato, not Hero herself, to purpose marriage. This makes the audience doubt the relationship between Claudio and Hero as it’s based only on attraction.

True love is a bond shared by few and dreamed of by everyone. The appearance of a relationship may not accurately depict the true reality of the situation. The bond between Claudio and Hero appears far stronger than that of Beatrice and Benedict, yet events of the play provide evidence for the converse. In Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing, the masked emotions of two couples are evoked through subterfuge.

In the past, societal behaviours, social relations and social institutions were by far different from today’s society. William Shakespeare’s classic play ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is a love story set in a patriarchal society, where most upper class marriages were based on wealth and prestige, not mutual respect; a society where a woman’s social standing could be easily be blackened by a crime she did not commit. Kristin Zomparelli says, “From biblical times through the twentieth century, beliefs of inherent male dominance and female inferiority prevailed,” this is shown through the characterisation of Claudio, Hero, and Beatrice, particularly their narrative arcs and viewpoints of social relationships and marriage; we are then able to identify the

Throughout much of Shakespearean Literature there is almost always the recurring theme of love, however this love is not always in its purest form. Instead, characters often find themselves in love at first sight; then quickly falling out of love or finding out they never truly loved the other person. In Shakespeare’s, Much Ado About Nothing, we see Shakespeare play heavily on the idea of love at first sight so significantly that it influences the play in its entirety. Focusing on the characters of Claudio and Hero in the play, we see the impulse of love come to fruition almost instantaneously. In the beginning of play, Claudio gazes on Hero only to be struck with cupid’s arrow meaning his love for her is based purely upon superficial looks.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written in Elizabethan Times, is one of the most famous love stories of all time. It follows the story of two “star-crossed lovers”, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, who fall in love after meeting at a Capulet masquerade. The two protagonists married each other the next day, by a friar in his cell, and face difficulties in their attempt to be together. Elizabethan marriages differ from modern marriages today. For example the arrangements, wedding invitations, wedding dresses, wedding receptions, and age of consent, but are similar in other areas. Modern marriages have many differences from Elizabethan marriages, but are alike in other aspects.

This function of marriage endured throughout much of human history, even transcending different cultures, so often, in plays from past centuries, marriage plots function not like a familiar Katherine Heigl romantic comedy but rather like a business deal. This disparity leaves modern audiences who grew up on these movies unable to understand the at times strange, clinical nature of marriage in plays such as Goldoni’s A Servant To Two Masters. Furthermore, without this knowledge of the historical practice of marriage, audiences cannot clearly understand the dynamic between fathers and daughters like Pantaloon and