Much Ado About Nothing

“BEATRICE

I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick. Nobody marks you.

BENEDICK

What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?

BEATRICE

Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick?” 

The lightning-quick first exchange between Beatrice and Benedick sets up their whole relationship in miniature. Even in these first few lines, the hatred they profess for each other masks injured love. When Beatrice says that “nobody marks” (or pays attention to) what Benedick has to say, the obvious irony is that she pays attention to him and wants him to engage with her. The absurd and mercurial volatility of love and hatred in this exchange becomes one of the play’s major themes.

“That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most humble thanks; but that I will have a recheat winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is (for the which I may go to the finer), I will live a bachelor.” 

When Benedick makes this speech swearing off women and marriage forever, Claudio and Don Pedro reply that any man who talks like this will be in love within a matter of days. But Benedick’s words here, besides being ironically funny, also betray his anxieties. All his images are of hunting horns, evoking both the fear of being ripped to shreds and the fear of infidelity (horns were a ubiquitous symbol of cuckoldry). Benedick’s mistrust of marriage is at root less cynical than it is anxious.