Brazil has always been a magical place for me. I've never been there, so I'm not let down by reality. In my imagination, the big-box stores and the traffic jams simply don't exist. Instead, there's a fairy-tale land of palm trees, sensual beaches, late nineteenth-century architecture and samba schools.
The background of our production is consequently a bit of a mash-up of Brazilian history. We have imagined that the Empire lasted into the first decade of the twentieth century, whereas in actuality the last emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, abdicated and was forced into exile in 1889. It was an unexpected conclusion to a long and liberal reign by an unusually enlightened sovereign who often said that he could have led a very happy life as a teacher. The republicans who forced his abdication were backed by money from the rubber barons and sugar-cane magnates of the interior, who objected, violently, to Dom Pedro's support of anti-slavery legislation. Our Don Pedro is not the Emperor but an aristocrat on the Emperor's side. His brother, the ethically challenged Don John, we imagine to be backed by the republicans.
Certainly late nineteenth-century Brazil seems to reflect many of the values of Much Ado. There was a strong aristocratic tradition. Even today, the main street of Recife bears the name of a long-dead Brazilian viscount. There was a southern European insistence on the importance of family honour, and above all there was a sense of the joy of being alive which manifested itself most obviously in the carnivals. Also, unknown to most of us northerners, there is a great literary tradition of magic realism and some astonishing music.
Much Ado is surely ultimately about the vicissitudes of love. The whispering, the trickery - both benign and malicious - the sense of delight in Part One and the high drama of Part Two all seem to resonate most potently in the lush sensuality of Brazil, where the action, like life itself, is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes accompanied by music.
Much Ado About Nothing opens with a war just ended and the victorious army led by Don Pedro descending on the household of Leonato, Governor of Messina, who immediately throws a party. We sense a sleepy provincial community waking up and ready, as the soldiers are, for a bit of fun. But the friendly invasion includes Don Pedro's not-so-friendly half-brother Don John, evidently the loser of the war, and through the first half of the play the two brothers move the action in opposite directions.
Don Pedro is a matchmaker. When his follower Claudio declares his love for Leonato's daughter, Hero, Don Pedro steps in and woos on Claudio's behalf, creating some confusion in the process but ultimately sealing the match. Beatrice, Hero's cousin, and Benedick, another member of Don Pedro's entourage, profess mutual hostility and attack each other in a series of wit-combats whenever they meet. Don Pedro senses these two are really made for each other and contrives a plot to make them fall in love. But there is no match for Don Pedro; at the end of the play Benedick tells him, "Prince, thou art sad - Get thee a wife, get thee a wife!" and we may wonder if behind his sociability, his benevolent meddling in other people's lives, he is a loner, left out of the happiness he has helped bring about.
Don John, his opposite number, is certainly a loner. In a society in which conversation matters, he is "not of many words." He is driven by a general sense of resentment, as malicious as his brother is benevolent. Invited to a feast, he mutters, "Would the cook were o' my mind," fantasizing about poisoning everyone in the room. Beatrice declares that just looking at him gives her heartburn. But while Don Pedro hatches his own plots, Don John, hearing of the Claudio-Hero match and wanting to cross it, can't get beyond a general impulse to destroy and depends on his follower Borachio to devise a practical scheme. Borachio contrives that, using a clandestine meeting with Hero's waiting-woman Margaret, he will make Claudio, misunderstanding what he sees in the darkness, believe Hero has betrayed him.
This draws on another form of trouble the army has brought with it. The world of the barracks is an all-male world, and part of its automatic thinking is suspicion about women. The cuckold-jokes that persist throughout the play make the assumption that to be a husband is to be a cuckold, meaning the basic fact about women is that you can't trust them. We may think the jokes aren't really serious; but when Don John begins to slander Hero, Claudio and Don Pedro seem prepared to believe him even before they've seen the evidence, and we sense that behind the joking is an attitude that runs deep. Even Hero's father Leonato believes the slander at first, bitterly attacking her; he comes around eventually, but for a while he buys into the general male suspicion of women.
When Claudio declares his love for Hero, Benedick teases him for losing his manhood, preferring fashions to armour and fancy talk to plain speech. To love a woman is to be spoiled as a man. Claudio himself seems defensive and uncertain about his love, letting Don Pedro woo on his behalf and readily believing Don John's accusation that Don Pedro is wooing for himself. Yet when he denounces Hero in the church on their wedding day, the sheer passion of his tirade, startling in a character who has seemed so hesitant, suggests that beneath the anger is a real hurt at the loss of something he wanted to believe in.
The slander against Hero is pure falsehood; but when Don Pedro, Claudio and Leonato fool Benedick into thinking Beatrice loves him, and Hero and her waiting-woman Ursula fool Beatrice into thinking Benedick loves her, there may be truth behind the deception. When the warring couple meet, their need to score points off each other shows they simply can't leave each other alone. They talk so eloquently against marriage that we notice they can't keep their minds off the idea. Tricked by their friends, they slip into love as easily as Claudio slips into jealousy, and they seem to be not so much gaining new insight as admitting the truth that was there all along.
By comparison with Claudio and Hero, whose match follows strict social conventions and whose story is a familiar one with a long line of similar stories behind it, Beatrice and Benedick are original and unconventional, but their story follows and depends on the other one. Falling in love, they follow the lead set by Claudio and Hero, and the crisis in the other story produces a crisis for them. It is in the aftermath of Claudio's attack on Hero that they first declare their love for each other, and immediately that love faces its first test.
In the early scenes Beatrice has mocked Benedick's role in the male world of the army: as a soldier he is a washout who has never killed anyone, and as a friend he is fickle, having "every month a new sworn brother." Claudio's attack on Hero unleashes Beatrice's anger against the men responsible - the slander doesn't fool her for a minute - and she needs Benedick to prove his manhood and his loyalty to her by challenging Claudio. She wants him to be not just a man but "a man for my sake."
This means splitting him off from the male world that has been his only world so far, turning against his friends to make common cause with the woman they have abused and with the woman he loves. He has to turn his whole life around, and when at first he hesitates she declares, "There is no love in you." He makes his choice and takes up her challenge, and when he confronts Don Pedro and Claudio and they expect him to revive their old joking camaraderie, they are in for a shock.
But the mess created by Don John still has to be cleared up. So far, the visitors to Messina have driven the plot; it is left to the locals to solve it. Security in Messina is in the hands of Dogberry and the Watch, and the result is like watching a case that baffled Sherlock Holmes solved by Inspector Clouseau. Dogberry's specialty is muddling language: airing his views with supreme confidence, he has a genius for lighting on the wrong word. His notion of law enforcement is equally muddled: don't arrest anybody, it might annoy them.
The business of the Watch is to preserve the peace, and they decide their best course is to sit on a bench for a couple of hours and then go home to bed. They are as determined to avoid trouble as Don John is to cause it. Yet it is the Watch, having not a clue about what they are doing, who bring the truth of Don John's plot to light. Overhearing Borachio describe the trick he has played, they arrest him, thinking he has slandered Don John, and their confused report of his words at last clears the air. The problem is resolved not by some clever action on the part of the more intelligent characters but by a comic free-fall into absurdity.
By this time Don John has disappeared from the play, a spent force. Borachio not only clears Hero but insists that Margaret, mistaken for her in the dark, bears no blame. His concern for Margaret's reputation shows that, like Benedick, he has left the barracks and is learning to take women seriously. In the marriages that end the play, two soldiers marry two women of Messina, joining the army with the community. Claudio, thinking Hero is dead, is given "another Hero" who calls him her "other husband"; the cryptic language suggests that while they are literally the same people, they are new to each other, starting life afresh. And Benedick has turned 180 degrees, from the rough camaraderie of the army with its misogynist jokes to marriage with Beatrice. He even tries his hand at poetry. Spinning like this has left him happily dizzy: "man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion." It may be the play's conclusion too.
Alexander Leggatt is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto.
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