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“The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor”: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado about Nothing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Carol Cook
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Abstract

The comic conclusion of Much Ado about Nothing, which ends with the conventional closure provided by multiple marriages, leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated. The language of the play sets up a complex association of the word, the sword, and the phallus and represents the “merry war” between the sexes as a masculine struggle to maintain control of representation. To read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated. Masculine privilege is contingent on the legibility of women, whose ambiguous “seeming” gravely threatens the men of Messina and provokes them to use various defensive strategies against it, from the exchange of tendentious jokes to the symbolic sacrifice of Hero. The play itself is implicated in these strategies insofar as the characters' plot to recuperate Claudio through the fiction of Hero's death is also the plot of the play.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 2 , March 1986 , pp. 186 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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