Much Ado About Nothing Gender Analysis

The comedy in Much Ado About Nothing derives not just from the subversion of gender and romantic norms through the characters of Beatrice and Benedick, the couple who went against all the standards of the day, but some comedy also comes at the expense of those who do conform to society, Hero and Claudio. In Elizabethan times, women played a very small part in comedies, and normally The audience are conditioned to laugh at those who conform, but laugh with those who subvert it.

Gender stereotypes play a large role in the text, and from the subversion of the norms of gender roles comes much of the comedy. In the first scene, the audience of the time would not only be amused by the complex wordplay and clever comebacks, but also by the novelty

His name itself is a play on words, with “Bene” being Latin, a language most would speak at the time, for “Well”, and “Dick” being a bastardisation of the Latin “Dict”, meaning speech. The two come together to form “Well spoken”, a reference to the euphuistic language of the upper classes, particularly in witty battles of grandiloquent speech. In recent years, the latter part of Benedick’s name has taken on At the beginning of the play, Benedick comes across as a misogynist who thinks that marriage is ridiculous: at Claudio’s mention of his desire to court Hero, Benedick replies with the derisive question “I hope you have no intent to turn husband, have you?” showing Benedick’s feelings towards marriage is and that the best features of a woman are the ones displayed by Hero, stating that any woman he would consider marrying would have to be “Rich… Wise… Fair… Mild… Noble”. However, when the deceptions of Beatrice and Benedick begin, Benedick quickly begins to change into the very thing he previously mocked Claudio for. At the end of act two, scene three, Benedick has a short conversation with Beatrice in which he interprets every line as revealing her hidden love for him: he takes her innocuous demand that he come to dinner as containing “A double meaning” which clearly doesn’t exist. He goes as far to write her a song, something which would have been incredibly emasculating, since he was doing it solely for a woman. The audience would take pleasure in seeing a character that began so steadfast in his ideas changed so profoundly by love in a way men weren’t supposed to be: when Claudio becomes more masculine, Benedick becomes less so, so that there’s always a man subverting how masculinity is supposed to