He is attractive as a man, as his worst enemy, Don John, lets us know by his envy. But Claudio is also, as people aware only of the right thing to do tend to be, terrifyingly naïve (and terrifyingly obtuse). As Benedick puts it, Claudio reacts like a hurt bird when he thinks Don Pedro has taken Hero from him (“Alas, poor hurt fowl! Now will he creep into sedges” 2.1.200-1). And Benedick places Claudio’s romantic inclinations toward Hero at the level of the feelings of a small child by comparing Claudio to a “schoolboy who, being overjoyed with finding a bird’s nest, shows it his companion, and he [Don Pedro] steals it” (220-22). Claudio’s politeness, his sense of the socially appropriate, even leads him to suggest that he abandon his bride immediately after his marriage and accompany his sponsor, Don Pedro, from Messina to Aragon. Don Pedro again identifies for us the childlike quality of Claudio’s feelings for Hero when he replies: “that would be as great a soil in the new gloss of your marriage as to show a child his new coat and forbid him to wear it” (3.2.5-7).

In the church scene, Claudio’s turning on Hero for her supposed assignation on the eve of her marriage is wholly in keeping with the nature of his feelings for her and with the codes of his group. He moves toward his denunciation in the sententiously arrogant, teasing manner of the overly conventional person who has been fooled about something rather important and who will now take great pleasure in a measured retaliation. Claudio, the exquisite, reacts appropriately like a child cheated over a toy promised to him. And the absolute “rightness” of his attitude in the play is made quite clear by the fact that Hero’s father and Don Pedro instantly agree with it. Leonato, who was as concerned as Claudio, and Don Pedro with a “good” marriage, reacts, indeed, much as Capulet (also a socially conventional man) had reacted when Juliet had refused to marry Paris:

Why had I one?
Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?
... mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her—why she, O, she is fall’n
Into a pit of ink. (4.1.128-39)

Beatrice and Benedick, wholly unchildlike, present an- . other view of the essential stuff of this play, a view that cuts across the conventional one, and insinuates doubts lurking in sophisticated minds as to its necessary validity. They are everywhere presented as completely aware of the fact that they are playing roles with and for each other—Beatrice as shrew, Benedick as misogynist—and enjoying the playing. The subject matter of their game is a distaste for institutionalized romantic love leading to marriage, the precise kind of “love” that Claudio and Hero accept easily and without thought. The only obstacle to Claudio’s pursuit would be the sort of thing he thinks had happened, a lack of sexual virtue on the part of the girl who has caught his fancy. The subtle obstacle to the union of Benedick and Beatrice is that neither is ever sure of what he or she would be like if they agreed to quit playing their respective roles. Indeed, part of the dramatic (and psychological) excitement at the play’s end is that neither one of this pair is yet certain of what emotions really lie below the level of the role-playing.

The love game of Beatrice and Benedick is an intricate one in Much Ado, because both of them are teasing something more complicated than just conventional romantic love. They are dramatized as testing the antiromantic roles they are actually playing against their sense of what it would be like to be a Hero or a Claudio, to fall into the words and phrases and stances of institutionalized romance. Moreover, in their dueling in the self-accepted roles of the man and the woman too knowing to wear the yoke of marriage and to “sigh away Sundays,” it is always made dramatically obvious that both characters are aware that with any slipping either or both could easily become a Hero or a Claudio and turn husband and wife. Benedick’s first direct comment on Beatrice, early in the play (1.1.184-86), is, it seems to me, self-evident acknowledgment of this fact: “and she were not possessed with a fury, [Beatrice] exceeds [Hero] as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December.”

It is this ambivalent element in their love game, I think, that made Beatrice and Benedick so fascinating to their own age, and now also to us. And the basis of the fascination is that in their own probing of their reactions to ritualized romantic love, they invite us to probe the usually inaccessible areas of our own knowing, our own awareness in such matters. More important, if we think, at the play’s end, that Beatrice and Benedick merely exist for five acts to be tricked into admitting that they are fundamentally as conventionally involved in sex, love, and marriage as Hero and Claudio, we have missed the essential purport of the play.

Beatrice is the more open of the two in her acknowledgment of the ambiguity of her role-playing. Her acid remarks in the first scene of Act 1 concerning Benedick’s challenge to Cupid, and her uncle’s fool’s response (i.e., Beatrice herself ?), carry the suggestion, never made overt in the play, either that Beatrice had never been sure of her role as Lady Tongue or that she had once tried out a romantic role with Benedick himself. She is presented as openly uneasy (2.1) over the fact that Hero has got herself a husband (“I may sit in a comer and cry ‘Heigh-ho for a husband!’ ”). And she once darkly hints an earlier involvement with Benedick when she tells Don Pedro that Benedick lent his heart to her for a while, “and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice” (275-78).

The ambiguousness in Benedick’s role as misogynic bachelor is perhaps best suggested by the extravagant language he always uses to defend his role:

Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad maker’s pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of blind Cupid. (1.1.241-45)

His taunt to Claudio concerning Hero (“Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?” 173-74), and his headlong flight from Beatrice (2.1) with the bitter comment that “while she is here” he could live as quietly in hell, are but further illustrations of this extravagance. Dramatically, to be sure, such soaring flights of words prepare us for the irony of his surrender to love of a sort. Psychologically, they tempt us to wonder that a man could hate so vehemently what he professes to have no interest in.

The marriage of Hero and Claudio turns on the simple problem as to whether Hero is a virgin or not, i.e., as to whether she is socially and therefore personally acceptable to Claudio in his aristocratic world of arranged marriages.