But it is an ease that is completely sustained as “tone” or manner throughout the play. One finds it in Don Pedro’s and in Benedick’s teasing of Balthasar, for example, for his reluctance to sing in front of them (2.3). It is the element which gives credibility to Borachio’s rambling discourse to Conrade on fashion (3.3). It is what makes Benedick’s sudden playing the role of schoolteacher and grammarian (“How now? Interjections?”) in the church scene (4.1) so believable and so desperately ironic. It is what makes so devastating the unexpected and embarrassed encounter that Don Pedro and Claudio have with Leonato and Antonio after the disgracing of Hero (5. 1).

Another aspect of the sustained, mimetic realism of Much Ado has to do with the kind of language that makes up the complex, closely interwoven dialogue of the play. The language used to carry the interchanges between Rosalind and Orlando, or between Viola and Duke Orsino, is romantically stylized and tempts us to immerse ourselves in some ideal, golden world of love. The language used for the interchanges between characters in Much Ado constantly reminds us of the flow of clever discourse in the best moments of the actual world we all inhabit. And the potency of this language of Much Ado is such that it seems capable of generating the natural, this-worldly atmosphere of the play just in itself. It is not the formalized repartee, the carefully contrived and balanced give and take of wit in Restoration comedy. Rather, its special quality is its air of the spontaneous. In Much Ado it is as if the characters themselves were inventing in front of us their quick ironic retorts and their exultant gaiety at the accomplishment.

The characters in this play take their dramatic world to be so much alive that they are constantly remembering what they have said to each other earlier in the action. The most striking example of this sort of realism is the acid repetition to Benedick by Don Pedro and by Claudio (5.1 and 5.4) of Benedick’s extravagant description (1.1) of what may be done to him if he ever falls in love. But Beatrice, who turns the word “stuffed” inside out in her ridicule of Benedick (1.1), later tempts Margaret to use it against her (3.4): “A maid, and stuffed!” Don Pedro, with Claudio by (5.1), catches his anger at Leonato’s importunate language in the deftly sardonic phrase, “we will not wake your patience.” Claudio, moments later in the same scene (after he learns that he has been grossly fooled), expresses his genuine contrition to Leonato by slightly varying the same phrase: “I know not how to pray your patience.” Even the two members of the watch, who are worried about “one Deformed” in 3.4, find Dogberry carefully remembering in 5.1 to have Borachio examined “upon that point.”

The sustained, conversational quality of the dialogue of Much Ado, which accompanies and gives body to the nonchalant casualness of the character confrontations in the play, is perhaps the ultimate essence of the play’s mimetic richness. The characters may individualize what they say, but they all speak essentially the same sophisticated-realistic language of their group. In its imagery it is much concerned with the act of sex and with the expected cuckoldry of their society (“he that is less than a man, I am not for him”; “Tush, fear not, man! We’ll tip thy horns with gold”). It is also full of the kind of literary reference that would be known to a person of such a society. Hercules, Ate, Europa and Jove, Baucis and Philemon are tossed into the stream of discourse; Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and A Handful of Pleasant Delights are quoted; Beatrice makes use of current attitudes already exploited in Davies’s poem Orchestra in her description of marriage as a dance. But beyond all this sort of identifying conversational style is an “aliveness” in what the characters say to one another. It is this extravagant “aliveness,” in combination with the play’s other dramatic devices, that gives to Much Ado its separate identity of discourse. In no other of Shakespeare’s comedies could one of its characters call another, with such eloquent understatement, “my Lady Tongue.”

The substance of Much Ado is that of the romantic comedies, sex, love, and marriage. But this play’s differentiated way of regarding this substance, its sophisticated realism, is certainly intentionally suggested by its title. Within the play itself there are two views of this substance. One view is that assumed by Claudio, Don Pedro, Leonato, and Hero. Claudio is the central, dominating voice of this group as he acts out its social assumptions. He is presented as a conventional young man, one who regards love and marriage as the making of a sensible match with a virtuous and attractive young girl who brings a good dowry and the approval of her father and of his friends. Although a young man today, a member of a similar social group, might put his feelings in somewhat more romantic terms, if he were of a “good” family in any city of the Western world, he might essentially agree with Claudio’s view.

Claudio is certainly no passionate Romeo, and there is no indication in the play that he has done more than regard Hero as an attractive member of the aristocratic society to which they both belong. He is (perhaps somewhat in the position of Paris, in Romeo and Juliet) a young man capable of an easy romanticizing of sexual attraction, as his comment on Hero to Don Pedro fully reveals:

... now I am returned and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying I liked her ere I went to wars. (1.1.291-95)

Claudio, again like Paris, is the young man bent on doing “the right thing” in his society.