Comedic and serious elements in Act Four of Much Ado About Nothing

So we've finally made it. This is it readers, the most important scene in the play, the scene the whole story pivots around. This is Act Four, Scene One AKA the wedding scene. It is odd, then, that this scene, of all scenes, starts with an (admittedly very brief) bit of comedy involving Claudio saying "No" (line 5) to the question of whether he would marry Hero and everybody just ignoring it and proceeding with the marrage ceremony. Naturaly, however, this comedic start is then plunged into much more serious waters shortly afterwards, line 28 in fact...

From line 28 to line 40, Claudio rails off a pre-prepared verbal assult on Hero, who he calls a "rotten orange" and a "maid". Answer me this, does Claudio once in the barrage make any reference to Borachio the man who he saw "talking to" the woman he thought was Hero? No he does not. Why? Because he doesn't want to "own" Borachio. He wants to "own" (as Elizibethan men did to their wives) Hero, like you would own an orange, or a maid. Claudio wants Hero as a status symbol, as I have typed before, and he would rather shame and humiliate Hero (and to a far lesser extent, Leonardo) than, y'know, maybe ask her in private or judge her character and assess whether she is likely to have "spoken" to any men in the past. Of course, the second option doesn't seem very likely, as if you can't tell that Don John isn't to be trusted after going to war with him for pressumably quite some time, then I very much doubt that Hero would be within the realms of assesability for gullable old Claudio. The entire speach is said in verse, like most of Claudio's lines. I assume this is one of Shakespeare's ways of communicating to the audience that this is serious, as most bits of comedy in this play are in blank verse. Could it be that verse is used for serious elements of the play and blank verse for the comedy?

After Claudio's public denouncement of Hero, he and the brothers Don proceed to convince Leonato of her guilt from line 41 to line 107. It really doesn't take the three men very long at all to convince HERO'S OWN FATHER of her dishonesty. Surely Leonato of anybody would not believe Hero's guilt, but that fine honour would fall with Beatrice, Hero's friend. Could Shakespeare be making a comment on Elizabethan England disguised behind the mask of a play set in Messina? Could he possibly be suggesting that rich fathers ought to know their children more? It would certainly help Leonato if he knew Hero more, because Beatrice, who, having been Hero's "bedfellow" for a year, actually knows Hero and so believes her to be innocent and wrongly accused by Claudio and the two Princes.

Read line 107. Read it? Good. "Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?". This line said by Leonato has two possible meanings, that he has been shamed by the accusations or that he is being overly dramatic about everything in order to pile more humiliation on Hero. I am inclined to believe that it is the latter, as he exclaims rather melodramatically that "death is the fairest cover for HER shame" (line 115). He refers to the shame as her's, rather than his or the family name. I accept that he must feel a little ashamed, because why else would he do something so morraly repugnant as to wish death upon his child, but as I say, he still refers to the shame all being on the shoulders of Hero.

Now read line from 123 to 125. Did Leonato really just say that? This man has been utterly convinced of Hero's guilt that he would murder her, had she not passed out already. This is serious subject matter for a supposed comedy, in fact, i'd go as far as to say that it was damn near tragedy matterial! And what evidence would he murder her on? The words of three men and nothing more. Again, Shakespeare could be making a comment here on Elizabethan society. Three men accusing one woman of misdeeds and the woman being killed without a trial or any investigation into the misdeed? Sounds like a witch hunt to me, which were common in Shakespeareian England. Could it be that Shakespeare was against such practices and included evidence of this in his plays, or am I reading too much into it?

From line 153 to line 167, the Friar has a speach, in which he declares that he is on the side of Hero. Hero, being a christian as everyone had to be in Messina by law (and England, what a coincidence), would have gone to confession and confessed all of her various and pressumably minor sins to the Friar. So, in that way, the Friar would know that she wasn't the sort of person to do such a thing. The Friar is the only male character not to believe Claudio's tale of misdeeds, and he is also the male character that knows her the most. This scene is all very serious...

In line 202, the Friar hatches a plan to make Claudio and the other men (minus Benedick and Leonato) believe that Hero were dead. Do you know of any other Shakespeare plays in which a friar has a plan to make it seem that a lady is dead, when in fact, she is not? Yes, Romeo and Juliet. That play was a tragedy, so could it be that Shakespeare is trying to imply to the audience that this play is heading that way too?

After the Friar, Leonato and Hero leave in order to set up the Friar's plan, Benedick and Beatrice the comedic characters are left alone. In line 285, grief stricken Beatrice says a very un-comedic thing indeed. She asks Benedick to "Kill Claudio". How could it be that even the comedic characters are now acting serious? This play has taken a turn for the tragic.

Right, now that i've typed eight paragraphs about the first scene in the act, we'll move onto the one that I am going to write about the second scene. The second scene that I mention is very much light relief after the wedding scene. In fact, almost all of this scene, in which Borachio and Conrade are questioned by the police, is comedic, bar prehaps two lines that Dogberry (the clown/fool) says. The two lines of seriousness are lines 39 and 40, where Dogberry calls it "flat perjury" to call Don John a villain. Could it be that Shakespeare was making a comment on the royal families of Europe's immunity to the laws that they themselves created? Yes, I think he could.