Date sent:        Tue, 30 Apr 96 03:39:45 UT

Uploader: Patricia Syquia
E-Mail: Red_Lantern@msn.com
Subject: English--Shakespeare
Topic: an analysis of a passage from Much Ado about Nothing
Grade Receved: B+
Comments:
 I wrote this the first semester of my freshman year in college. I was 18. 
It's a super-pretentious piece because I was trying to impress my professor. 
The sentence structure is embarassing to read now, and some words I took from 
the thesaurus without being sure exactly what they meant. If your teacher is 
big into verbosity, you might luck out with an A-. But more sensible teachers 
will just get annoyed by it. Despite the complex, sometimes indecipherable 
grammar though, I STILL think I had a good point. 




English 67: Shakespeare

Eating Words: Food for Thought
(IV.i.79-92)


 The Shakespearean comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, though a light-hearted 
romp, is not without more complex dimension. In a brief teasing exchange among 
the women, Margaret's sassy comment to Beatrice (IV.i.79-92), though a 
seemingly trivial passage, contains in a nutshell one of the play's central 
themes. Throughout the different scenarios, there is an extended play on words 
having to do with the image of food and eating. Words are likened to food, 
"[Claudio's] words are very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes." 
(II.iii.20-21) Words become the characters' sustenance and those that lack it, 
like the silent Hero, "die". In order to bring Hero back to life, words must 
be eaten, the very same words that condemned her, by those who accused her. 
This pattern of the throwing out words then later eating them become essential 
to resolving conflict within the play. 
 Margaret's short speech is a response to Beatrice's demand of an explanation 
of the former's broad hints about Benedick. In answering, Margaret is 
purposely ironic, that is, she says exactly the opposite of what she means.  
"You may think perchance that I think you are in love. Nay, by'r lady, I am 
not such a fool to think what I list, nor I list not to think what I can, nor 
indeed I cannot think, if I would think my heart out of thinking, that you are 
in love, or that you will be in love, or that you can be in love." 
(IV.i.80-86) Although this is deliberate coyness on Margaret's part, the 
oppositeness of implicit meaning and explicit words is reminiscent of 
Dogberry's similar, albeit, unconscious habit and in keeping with the 
prevalent tone of sarcasm generated by the bickering of Beatrice and Benedick.
 These small instances of antilogy are telling of the one of a much grander 
scale. Every character in the play either consciously or unconsciously lies. 
Beatrice and Benedick both lie unconsciously when they each vow never to get 
married. Claudio, Don Pedro, and even her own father, for a moment,  
unknowingly ally themselves with the conscious lie about Hero perpetuated by 
Don John and Borachio. Hero, Leonato and Antonio all willingly participate in 
the Friar's deceitful scheme of pretending Hero is dead. If Claudio's words of 
love and romance are compared by Benedick to a banquet (II.iii.20-21), these 
lies are "poison" (II.ii.21) which turn such idealized figures as lovers and 
maids into "oysters" (II.iii.24) and "contaminated stale" (II.ii.25) Once more 
apparent are the food images. 
Finding out the truth is tantamount to eating one's words. Indeed, with the 
playwright's numerous puns on food (the civil orange), references to appetite 
(Benedick's queasy stomach), and occasional direct phrase, ("Will you not eat 
your word?") it is not entirely unexpected. Margaret plainly says this as she 
predicts the outcome of Beatrice and Benedick's merry, romantic subplot. "Yet 
Benedick was such another, and now is he become a man. He swore he would never 
marry, and yet now in despite of his heart he eats his meat without grudging; 
and how you may be converted I know not, for methinks you look with your eyes 
as other women do." (IV.i.86-92)  The metaphor of "eating his meat without 
grudging" is glaringly conspicuous. In Elizabethan English, the phrase meant 
"has an appetite like any other man", and is a large enough hint if 
interpreted this way. But the pun of the line is even more obvious to the 
modern reader given its common contemporary usage. 
In Shakespeare's farcical play, Much Ado About Nothing, there is clearly a 
considerable ado over the mundane ritual of eating. The playwright pointedly 
invests a special import in food, whose role as a basic necessity almost 
always renders it and integral but invisible component in stories about 
people. Despite appearances, this frothy comedy the Bard serves up certainly 
offers some food for thought. 
