First of all, it is of course a great privilege to play the role. There’s a reason all Shakespeare actresses want to add this role to their resumes. I was excited to have the opportunity because it was this year that I really felt ready for the role. Or ready for my first stab at the role. I’m sure I’ll play her again, and I’m sure I’ll play her better, but I felt emotionally and mentally prepared to take a crack at the role for the first time.
Beatrice is glorious. It’s clear from reading the play, or seeing the play, that she is a great character. But when you play her, you can’t help being in love with her. I am also incredibly envious of her. She is everything I want to be. She is all my best parts, with none of my faults. The woman is smart, smarter than anyone else around her, including Benedick. This is a very frustrating position to hold – when no one seems able to keep up. Add to this the fact that she is in a world where her power and autonomy are limited. Where she can resist the traditional roles of male and female only to a certain degree. She has been hurt and disappointed in love and yet she never gives way to the kind of bitterness and negatively that I feel. Sure, it would be possible for an actress to take all of Beatrice’s witty comments and give them a bitter edge, but I think to do this too much is to miss part of the character – for I think many of her lines feel very light and I have to believe Leonato when he says, “she is never sad but when she sleeps, and not ever sad then.” Sure, she is accused of being curst, but Don Pedro also says she has a “merry heart.”
Her heart is so open and so generous and so loyal. Beatrice never doubts Hero’s fidelity and she puts everything on the line to save her cousin. I think she is fully aware of the fact that she could lose Benedick’s affection forever when she asks him to kill Claudio.
People may want to accuse Beatrice of the fault of pride. Hero certainly does in the duping scene. But Hero is playing a trick on Beatrice, so how much she really means what she says is open to interpretation. Beatrice may be scared of relationships, scared of marriage, scared of losing power to a husband, scared of being hurt again by Benedick, but when she hears that he loves her, she conquers her fears and commits fully. She delivers a soliloquy, one of the few times in the play that she speaks in verse, and the only time she refers to Benedick with the more intimate “thee/thy/thou.”
What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell; and maiden pride, adieu;
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And Benedick, love on, I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band.
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.
This actually brings me to the first of three topics that I wanted to address. This moment was to me the most difficult moment in the show, and preceded by the most difficult scene. And I think many people have difficulty with the Beatrice Duped scene. Shakespeare’s not doing the female characters any favors. The Benedick Duped scene comes first and it’s funnier. All we are doing is repeating a joke that has already been made. The scene is redundant. And for an actor such as myself, the scene has additional difficulties. I don’t believe in the actor being funny. I believe in the writer being funny and the actor playing the scene. But in this (comic) scene, where I was supposed to be funny, I had no lines. And then I had to end the scene with ten lines where Beatrice does a complete 180. She hears criticisms about herself and decides to change immediately. How many people can do something like that? Her courage is astounding.
So just think about everything an actress has to pull together in this moment:
1. Speaking verse – a change for Beatrice
2. Direct audience contact
3. The extreme pain of hearing someone you love say terrible things about you
4. The immediate decision to change behaviors
5. The extreme joy of hearing that Benedick loves her
6. Talking to Benedick who isn’t there
7. A final line that sounds awkward to modern ears
Then you have to take all that and still strike the right tone and level of levity considering the fact that you are in the middle of a comedy, and the end of a comic scene, and the heavy stuff comes later. Conversely, it’s also really possibly to underplay this speech. So basically I was never satisfied with how I played this speech. In the end, I had to just trust the vision of the director, who wanted to keep this moment on the lighter side. But there’s a lot to explore there, and I don’t think I got it all.
The difficulty of that moment did not surprise me. It’s a speech that has always given me pause whenever seeing the play or reading it. But the second topic I wanted to talk about was what did surprise me about Beatrice. The play is a delightful comedy, but when I was playing Beatrice I did not feel like I was in a comedy. The wedding scene, where you have nothing to say, followed by the Kill Claudio scene, where emotions and rage and words pour out of you, is incredibly taxing. After this she has a short scene with Benedick and then the final, wrap up scene where love finally wins. It all ends happily, but in terms of time, it happens very quickly after those raw emotional scenes. I found myself as worn out and drained by Beatrice and I was by Isabella in Measure for Measure. Isabella is practically raped and led to believe that her brother is dead. It’s a rough character journey to go through, and Beatrice’s journey was as much a rollercoaster, and as exhausting. And that really surprised me. Of course the side-by-side existence of witty comedy and terrible tragedy is what makes Much Ado About Nothing so brilliant.
Thirdly, I want to address one specific moment. at the end of the play “Peace, I will stop your mouth.” This line is famous amongst Shakespeare scholars. Every time you see this play, Benedick says this line. The only version of this play we have is the Quarto from 1600. In this text, this line is marked as Leonato’s. It was a later editor (Theobald) that assigned the line to Benedick, and most editions after have followed suit. The Arden edition notes the line as Leonato’s. The Folger gives it to Benedick, despite its insistence on following Quarto notes in other locations, such as claiming that Leonato has two brothers and not one.
I was quite excited to learn on the first day of rehearsal that we were following the Quarto and giving the line to Leonato. After all, I had never seen it performed this way. And naturally, as a Shakespeare scholar, one has to be interested in how choices like this change a play or scene.
The Arden buys into Leonato saying this line because it “is in keeping with his characteristic attempts to stage-manage this scene, and his role as Beatrice’s guardian; it also provides for a more egalitarian accommodation between the lovers than would Benedick’s own declaration of intent to silence Beatrice” (emphasis mine). And it was really for that second reason that our director liked the choice, and it is also the reason I was interested in it. After all, when Leonato delivers the line it can be said to both Benedick and Beatrice, instead of just to Beatrice.
In the course of my research I consulted the RSC edition of this play. If you have not seen this series, which is relatively new, I highly recommend it. The editions include interviews with RSC actors and directors that are quite enlightening and thought-provoking. When asked about this moment, director Nicholas Hynter said, “There are all sorts of reasons to give the line to Leonato that look good in the study. … But in the theater, it’s blindingly obvious that the line is Benedick’s.”
I immediately rejected Hynter’s statement because he seemed to be concretely denying the viability of the choice to give the line to Leonato. Nonsense, I thought, surely it can be made to work. You can’t just categorically deny that.
Hynter was right; I was wrong. When you are living the play and the characters it just has to be Benedick’s line. This was something else that really surprised me – that something with clear possibilities intellectually turned out to be so obviously wrong theatrically. Harriet Walter says in the RSC edition exactly what I discovered in my rehearsal process: “I am convinced that it is better to give the line to Benedick, and I don’t find it is a sinister suffocation at all. Rather, it seems to be a restoration of their usual banter but with love behind it now.”
I discovered that it actually felt more suffocating, more sexist, to have Leonato say the line, especially having lived through what Beatrice lived through. She saw her uncle immediately side with the men against Hero, and react in an incredibly vitriolic way. He is horrible to Hero in the wedding scene. This man then arranges to have Hero marry Claudio despite what he has done. Then to have that man tell you to get married and then control how it happens – it does not feel good.
And it turns out not to be a suffocation when Benedick says it. Beatrice is smarter than Benedick. Every encounter they have, she wins. Like Berowne, Benedick always has to duck out of the witty banter when he finds himself at a loss for a response. If he says, “Peace, I will stop your mouth” it is simply a continuation of this relationship, full of love and deference to her wit.
My production kept the line as Leonato’s since that was the choice that had been made. And I think the difficulty of the moment was diffused due to the fact that Leonato was played by a female actor (still as a male role though). But I still appreciated the fact that we were exploring and discussing the moment. We all talked about it in a conversation close to opening and the director agreed that is probably was always meant to be Benedick’s line. But it was certainly fascinating to get to discover that fact for myself.
Oh, I lied. There is a fourth topic I want to discuss. And that is the magic of original practices. In an original practices production, the goal is to involve the audience, and we as actors work to let them know that they are allowed to respond however they see fit. During Much Ado About Nothing we had a couple of audiences that were with us at every moment, and they let us know it. It was thrilling. When Beatrice and Benedick are face to face for the first time after the duping scene and they final admit their love, the audiences loved it. I would say, “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protect” and then run into his arms and we would kiss for the first time. As we were kissing, audiences would cheer. It was magical. It was exhilarating. An experience like that reminds you just how rewarding acting can be.
(Photos 1 and 2 by Kelly Dowling. Photos 3 and 4 by Kevin Hollenbeck)
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