Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  Another example of this comes in Act II, Scene 1, when Don Pedro says,

  Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick,

  and Beatrice replies:

  Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it, a double heart for a single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.

  She speaks in prose for most of the play. One always has to find reasons why a character speaks in prose or in verse, and it seems to me that, for Beatrice, prose lends itself to running rings round her meaning, to spontaneity and to dodging the bullet. It felt to me as though she was both wanting to be found out, and absolutely loath to be found out, at the same time. Her jokes are a brilliant mask and also a trap.

  It takes the two eavesdropping scenes to reveal Beatrice and Benedick’s true feelings to themselves, and it is their private shock (and relief in a way) on discovering their love—and the way in which they ‘privately’ confess it to the audience—that is so moving and funny. It is also important for all the actors involved in those duping scenes in the garden to remember that each group thinks they are tricking each of the lovers into believing a lie that the other is in love with them, and neither group realises till much later that they have in fact revealed the truth.

  Benedick blusters as he climbs down from his well-advertised position:

  When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

  Beatrice makes her only break into verse to deliver a much humbled and uncharacteristically straightforward soliloquy. It is her only soliloquy in the play, and her only opportunity to tell the audience things she wouldn’t dream of revealing to anyone ‘inside’ the play:

  What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?

  Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?

  Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!

  No glory lives behind the back of such.

  And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,

  Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand:

  If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee

  To bind our loves up in a holy band;

  For others say thou dost deserve, and I

  Believe it better than reportingly.

  It helped my humiliation that I was soaked from head to foot at the time, hair bedraggled and dress clinging to my every curve. Hero and friends, knowing that Beatrice was eavesdropping on them behind the hedge, thought it would be fun to turn the hose on it and her. (I actually longed for that moment as I was usually pretty warm by that point in the play.)

  The Hero/Claudio plot takes over so quickly after Beatrice and Benedick discover their love for one another that Shakespeare denies the latter couple the happy pay-off scene, or at least he postpones it until Act V, Scene 2. Instead, they have to admit their love in the urgent and stressed circumstances of Hero’s humiliation at the wedding. Just as Beatrice is beginning to unfurl and put her trust in Benedick, she is reminded of all that she mistrusts about the male species. There is Claudio willing to believe so quickly that his betrothed has been sleeping with another man, and Hero’s own father is shockingly quick to believe hearsay above a lifetime’s knowledge of his daughter. Both men love their own honour better than they ever love Hero.

  Although we know there are plenty of cultures in the world that still uphold these values, a modern Western audience finds the plot quite hard to believe at this point.

  By setting the play in Sicily (1940’s: Abyssinian campaign, maybe) with visual references that brought to mind the flashbacks in The Godfather II, the director Greg Doran placed the play in a world where the dual codes of omertà and the Catholic Church set the rules for people’s lives. In this context, Claudio’s behaviour is believable and Beatrice’s bloody-mindedness is justified. It comes from a deep place of fear, however humorously expressed. In such a culture, the bonds between men are stronger than any bond between a man and a woman, and while young women will stick together in mutual protection against this fact, once they marry they are expected to switch their primary loyalty to their man and children.

  Beatrice is the outsider, the transgressor against tradition. Paradoxically, it’s precisely the resistance to the yoke of marriage that binds Beatrice and Benedick together. It is what makes the relationship distinctive and very modern. They may not want to submit to marriage, but they are getting dangerously old to play the hard-to-get game.

  From the moment Beatrice and Benedict admit their love to one another they are free to respect one another’s strength of character. In each of them, submitting to love was linked with an idea of loss of power, of control. But having had such a long-drawn-out and often antagonistic courtship, they can be said to really know one another and to have seen the worst of one another. This is very different from the untested and idealistic love between Claudio and Hero, who have really only fallen in love with one another’s image and social suitability. Shakespeare deliberately contrasts these two types of relationship, and each plot elucidates the other.

  Hero can seem a colourless, rather wimpy character, but in the all-female scenes—the duping scene, Act III, Scene 1, and the scene before her marriage day, Act III, Scene 4—we see the real Hero, uninhibited by the presence of her father or any other man. With her women around her Hero is the alpha female, and the actress gets the chance to show the sparky girl that Beatrice loves, so different from the subdued trophy bride and favourite daughter she is forced to play in public.

  By the end of Act IV, Scene 1, the love affair between Beatrice and Benedick has pretty much been resolved, but the play is far from over. The audience has grown to love Beatrice, and Beatrice loves and values Hero. This gives the rest of the play a solemnity, an urgency for lessons to be learnt, justice to be meted out and reconciliation to be earned.

  In the midst of this plot unravelling, Shakespeare gives Beatrice and Benedick a lovely scene which doesn’t really have any big dramatic purpose other than to delight and satisfy the audience. The couple have still not announced their love to the onstage world, and they have a secluded scene together where they enjoy the relief of dropping the pretence, and basking in one another’s love.

  It starts with Benedick alone on stage trying to compose a love-poem to Beatrice but giving up because

  I was not born under a rhyming planet.

  Beatrice then enters. How are they going to proceed? Immediately we get the mock crossed swords, and Beatrice needs to know whether Benedick has followed through the challenge to Claudio. Benedick answers efficiently:

  Claudio undergoes my challenge; and either I must shortly hear from him, or I will subscribe him a coward.

  Then he segues straight to the chase:

  And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?

  Then begins a scene that is extremely romantic because of its anti-romanticism. These two know one another of old but are looking at one another in a totally new light.

  The banter continues, but there is a world of difference between the veiled nastiness of their earlier exchanges and these playful insults that they both know are expressions of love.

  The scene is broken up by Ursula bringing them back to the immediacy of the Hero/Claudio plot, and Beatrice asks,

  Will you go hear this news, signior?

  Benedick comes out with the most wonderfully poetic, romantic line:

  I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes; and moreover I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.

  Who needs a love poem after that?

  Their next meeting is in the final scene. The plot is resolved. Don John has been unearthed as the perpetrator of the whole deception, and Hero has been ‘posthumously’ proven innocent. Claudio goes through a deep atonement and agrees to marry another woman that has been chosen for him—in itself a bit of a dodgy idea, but Greg worked hard to counter this and to make Claudio’s con
trition, which can seem way too glib, as sincere as possible.

  Everyone is assembled for the occasion when Claudio is to meet his new bride. The women enter all veiled, and Claudio must make his vows to a woman sight unseen. He declares his pledge to the veiled woman; she then lifts her veil; and hey presto she looks the image of Hero! Claudio cries out:

  Another Hero!

  and Hero neatly responds:

  One Hero died defiled, but I do live,

  And surely as I live, I am a maid.

  Love, tears and reconciliation all round. But there are a few loose ends still to tie up. Benedick imitates the ritual we have just seen and asks the remaining veiled women:

  Which is Beatrice?

  and Beatrice steps forward.

  They have a captive audience for their best act so far. Their power struggles are over. Beatrice no longer feels the need to have the last word, and together they can turn the tables on all the tricks played on them. ‘You thought we hated one another; well, surprise, surprise, we love one another.’

  It is reminiscent of the final scene in The Taming of the Shrew but without that play’s problematic ambivalence. This is not a woman’s capitulation. This is set to be a marriage of equals who truly know the person they have taken on and don’t want them to change.

  TWO LOVES

  Or, The Eternal Triangle

  In which I further touch on the characters of

  Ophelia, Portia, Beatrice, Helena, Viola, Imogen and Cleopatra

  As Viola with Donald Sumpter (Orsino)

  Twelfth Night, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1987

  In 2011 I was commissioned to contribute a piece on any aspect of Shakespeare I wanted to explore, for a book called Living with Shakespeare: Actors, Directors, and Writers on Shakespeare in Our Time. It was edited by Susannah Carson for the American publishers, Vintage. I have edited it for the purposes of this book.

  Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

  Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

  The better angel is a man right fair,

  The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.

  Sonnet 144

  It has been, and probably ever will be, up for debate as to whether Shakespeare’s Sonnets are autobiographical, but Sonnet 144 gave rise to a line of thought in my own mind whilst playing many of Shakespeare’s heroines. In all but a few cases, I found myself as a character in competition with another man for the love of the hero. I decided to try and chart the variations in this triangular tension through the plays I had performed in and perhaps even get closer to Shakespeare’s own feelings.

  Romeo and Juliet was the earliest of Shakespeare’s plays that I played in, by which I mean the earliest written (1593–5) rather than the first one I performed. I played the part for BBC Radio when I was thirty but could sound a convincing thirteen. However young, Juliet seems more mature throughout the play than Romeo, who is to a certain extent dragged back by the boy culture which he is part of. Mercutio and his band of friends mock him for his lovesick moping over a woman, first Rosaline, and later Juliet (Act II, Scene 4).

  Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench’s black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft.

  Romeo is seen as deserting the gang, and this theme is developed further in the later play Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedick’s soldier companions ridicule his succumbing to love and marriage with Beatrice. In both these examples there is a tinge of jealousy and a fear of losing their mate to another mysterious world that they do not understand and therefore need to despise—the world of women and marriage, which they feel necessarily leads to a betrayal of the buddy culture in which they are stuck.

  Much Ado was written in 1598, at about the same time that Sonnet 144 is thought to have first been circulated amongst Shakespeare’s closest friends. When I played Beatrice at the RSC in 2002, I felt very aware of the tussle that Benedick was going through between the strong male bonding to his army mates, and his tentative gropings towards a complicated grown-up heterosexual love for Beatrice. Shakespeare deliciously plays with Benedick’s pride in his soliloquy in Act II, Scene 3, when he has just overheard that Beatrice is in love with him and has to wriggle out of his own past pledge to remain a bachelor (Act II, Scene 3):

  I have railed so long against marriage: but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

  Even at this point he does not quite admit that he could possibly love Beatrice but couches his change of heart from male love to female in the more or less honourable excuse: ‘The world must be peopled.’ Maybe this was the philosophy of Shakespeare’s day. Physical love could be homo- or heterosexual, but the latter had to be surrendered to in the end in order to keep the species going. Marriage was a biological duty or imperative, while one’s true tastes and heart might lie elsewhere.

  With this thought in mind, I found a way through the almost impossible ‘Kill Claudio’ moment in Act 4, Scene 1. At the prompting of the malevolent Don John, Claudio has slandered Hero and left her at the altar. Beatrice is distraught for her friend’s sake, and when Benedick entreats, ‘Come, bid me do any thing for thee,’ she responds with the unexpectedly harsh, ‘Kill Claudio.’ For me, rather than it being simply an irrational incitement to murder, the line became a different kind of test, whose subtext was: ‘Prove to me that you are willing to cut out from your heart the strutting misogynist ethos of Claudio and your old gang.’ At the same time I had to confront the fact that Beatrice is no pacifist saint. She herself would show no mercy to Claudio: ‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place’, or at least this is her boast, whose main purpose is to throw down a gauntlet to Benedick challenging him to be a ‘proper’ man, to be as brave and avenging as she would be if she could.

  Benedick passes his test with flying colours and without having to actually kill Claudio. All the worlds are reconciled and the villain Don John is punished in the end. Only the ambiguous figure of Don Pedro, whose love for both Benedick and Beatrice is never quite expressed, remains unresolved. Benedick thinks he has the solution: ‘Prince, thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife.’ Somehow we feel that won’t fix Don Pedro’s ‘problem’.

  ‘Sad’ is the word that strikes one when considering Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (1596). It is sometimes thought that Shakespeare played this eponymous role in a play where the other characters, especially Shylock, eventually eclipse the person who had started as the central figure. In fact, Antonio opens the play with ‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.’ Here again is a triangular relationship between an older man, a younger man and a woman.

  Antonio and the heiress Portia are both in love with Bassanio. Bassanio himself is caught between his loyalty to a man who has mentored and cherished him and whom he knows fairly intimately, and a woman whom he finds beautiful and amazing (and yes, is extremely rich), who has the mystique of a distant shimmering object that he knows very little about.

  The adventurer in him is what both his lovers like about him. Bassanio dares to have a go at Portia’s dead father’s test—a suitor is presented with three caskets; if he chooses the right one he wins Portia’s hand, and if he does not he must remain celibate for the rest of his life—and he chooses the right casket. Just as he and Portia are about to celebrate his success, he hears of Antonio’s plight—the merchant has lost his ships and is being held to ransom by Shylock to pay him what he owes. Without a moment’s hesitation, Bassanio rushes to Antonio’s side. Portia, hurt by this but nothing daunted, decides to disguise herself as a lawyer and defeat Shylock in court. The realisation is painful to her that it is only by saving Antonio that she will find the way to Bassanio’s heart.

  After her success in the courtroom, there is a key scene between the disguised Portia and Bassanio where she tries to get him to give her the ring that he promised Portia never to remove. He manages
to hold out and refuse to surrender it, and then Portia leaves, presumably well pleased that her betrothed has kept his pledge.

  Seconds later Gratiano, Bassanio’s friend, runs after her with the ring. Bassanio has changed his mind. All Antonio had had to say was ‘My Lord Bassanio, let him have the ring: / Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued against your wife’s commandment’. Portia has no words here to express it, but we must assume her hurt on realising how little it had taken to swing Bassanio’s loyalty away from his wife and back to the other man in the triangle.

  In the fifth act of The Merchant the intricate knot of complex loyalties is exposed and no one escapes without a sting. Bassanio has to face his own confusion of emotions vis-à-vis his admiration for a young boy lawyer who showed exceptional skill, initiative, courage and intelligence, and to whom he is indebted for the life of his friend, and he must digest the fact that this boy was one and the same as his supposed golden wife in her gilded Belmont cage. Portia has to live with her husband’s uncertain sexuality, and Antonio has to stand by and witness and eventually bless the heterosexual bond between his beloved Bassanio and the woman who saved his life.

  With Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida (both written in or around 1601) Shakespeare enters a darker, more misogynist phase. Imagine playing Cressida, reviled for her betrayal of Troilus, with no self-justifying speech to explain her actions to the audience or to posterity. It is as if Shakespeare abandons his own feisty creation like an unforgiving parent who has changed his mind about her worth.

  Imagine, too, playing Ophelia, and being told that

  The power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness,