Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice And Benedick Essay

Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing are not what you think. In Shakespeare’s famous play, one of the main parts of the story is two of the main characters, Beatrice and Benedick, falling in love with each other. But before they fall in love with each other, Beatrice was a feminist character who didn’t give in to social norms (marriage, woman being considered property) while Benedick was a woman hater who swore to never get married. So how do these two characters, who both want nothing to do with marriage and relationships, who also hate each other, fall in love with each other? The truth is, Beatrice and Benedick aren’t actualy in love.

In the book, Claudio, Leonato, Don Pedro, Hero, and Ursula come together with a plan to get

Beatrice and Benedick to fall in love with each other. The way they do this is that the guys talk loudly when they know Benedick is around.

They say that Beatrice loves Benedick, while Hero and Ursula do the same, but saying that Benedick loves Beatrice. This causes the two to end up falling in love with each other at the end of the book. But the truth is they don’t actually love each other, but the power of suggestion made them. Either that, or Benedick loves Beatrice, but she doesn’t love him back. At the end of the book, Beatrice says “Do not you love me?” and Benedick responds with, “Troth no, no more than reason.” (Shakespeare 101). What this scene says is that they truly didn’t love each other, but instead just believed that they did. “Ha! ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to / dinner.’ There’s a double meaning in that.” (Shakespeare 40). In this scene, Benedick now fully believes that Beatrice

loves him, but he doesn’t actually seem to love her back, and the same thing happens to Beatrice not later towards the end the book. This is where the other possibility comes into play, that Benedick loves Beatrice, but Beatrice doesn’t love him back. After the wedding goes wrong, this conversation occurs between Beatrice and Benedick “Tarry, good Beatrice. By this hand, I love thee.” “Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it.” (Shakespeare 75-76) In this scene, Benedick is trying to prove to Beatrice that he loves her, but what Beatrice wants is for Benedick to kill Claudio, which says that she doesn’t truly love him, but wants to use him.
Throughout the book, Benedick becomes more compassionate and caring than he was at the beginning of the book, where he was just a woman-hater.

But at the end of the book, he is rejected by Beatrice when they find out the whole thing was a plan by Hero, Claudio, Ursula, Don Pedro, and Leonato. Here, Benedick truly believes Beatrice loves him, but then is rejected. “A miracle! Here’s our own hands against our hearts. / Come, I will have thee. But by this light, I take thee / for pity.” “I would not deny you. But by this good day, I yield / upon great persuasion.” (Shakespeare 101). One might say “But they most likely started dating at the end of the book, and they kissed!” While yes, they did kiss, but that was when Benedick kissed her, she didn’t go in for the kiss, or go in for anything in that last part of the book. Even though it was revealed by Claudio and Hero that they both wrote love notes to each other, Benedick was still rejected by Beatrice in the end, but only starting actually “liking” him when Benedick kissed her. But why is the story like this? Why does Benedick love Beatrice, instead of the other way around? Well, in the book you can see as the plan unfolds, Benedick is the one to start loving Beatrice, but Beatrice was never really sure that she loved him back. “Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?” (Shakespeare 45) In this passage, she starts to really consider is she is what she says she is, and how she really feels about Benedick. But in the end

she decides that she doesn’t actually love him. The note that she had written to him was from when she couldn’t really decide how she truly felt. She was shocked when Hero presented the love note she had wrote because she didn’t truly love him, and she didn’t know what she was going to do after this.
In conclusion, Beatrice doesn’t love Benedick. Either that, or neither of them love each other. No matter what it is, they would be in a loveless relationship and they should probably stop dating before heartbreak or something else (possibly worse) occurs.