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  • "Stuffed with all honourable virtues":Much Ado About Nothing and The Book of the Courtier
  • Philip D. Collington

In a 1901 article published in PMLA, Mary Augusta Scott suggested that Shakespeare modeled the "merry war" of wits between Benedick and Beatrice on the verbal sparring between Castiglione's Gaspare Pallavicino and Emilia Pia, yet since then few critics have explored correspondences between Much Ado About Nothing (1600) and The Book of the Courtier (1528).1 This neglect is surprising, for as Peter Burke documents, Castiglione's book was widely read by Shakespeare's contemporaries, whether in Italian, in Thomas Hoby's 1561 English translation, or in subsequent Latin versions; and figures as varied as Roger Ascham, Francis Bacon, John Florio, King James I, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, George Puttenham, and Thomas Whythorne read and/or owned The Courtier.2 Eighteenth-century forger William [End Page 281] Ireland even signed Shakespeare's name in a 1603 edition of The Courtier (now in the British Library), prompting Burke to wonder: "Why did he do this? Did he consider Castiglione, like Shakespeare, to be a representative of the Renaissance?"3 Whatever Ireland's motives, the association of these two authors is well-founded. As Daniel Javitch explains, for Elizabethans seeking self-improvement, "Castiglione's perfect courtier had become an important and appealing model of civilized conduct"; and Walter Raleigh notes that, for writers in particular, The Courtier "proved an excellent book to steal from."4 Recent studies have uncovered indebtedness to Castiglione in a host of other plays, ranging from Love's Labor's Lost and Measure for Measure to Hamlet and Othello.5 Yet when it comes to Much Ado, little sustained commentary has been attempted since Scott: Geoffrey Bullough briefly notes how the scenes in which Benedick and Beatrice are duped into falling in love (2.3, 3.1) recall Lodovico Canossa's tale of a woman falling for a man upon hearing "the opinion of many" attesting to his worthiness (3.67); Barbara K. Lewalski devotes several pages to the play's links to Castiglione in debating matters of desire, knowledge, and neoplatonic love; and A. R. Humphreys acknowledges that Much Ado mirrors Castiglione's appreciation for verbal wit, decorum, dancing, and music.6

I believe that Shakespeare does more with The Courtier than simply [End Page 282] borrow character types, rework stock situations, or rehash humanist clichés about rhetoric and the arts, but I reopen this comparative project in the face of scholarly resistance. For although Scott praises The Courtier as a work that has "borne … well the judgment of time," the same cannot be said for her article (475-76). According to Burke, her list of correspondences "fail[s] to carry conviction" and should serve as a warning of "the danger of seeing Castiglione everywhere"; Humphreys considers the resemblances outlined by Scott "merely general parallels, sometimes quite loose, and not specific enough to prove a direct debt owed by Shakespeare to Castiglione"; and in a 1983 study, Louise George Clubb scoffs that Scott's argument "smacks of that desperation which is an occupational hazard to source hunters, especially Shakespearean ones."7 Others, when they mention links between Much Ado and The Courtier, dismiss them in passing and without substantiating their objections.8 My point is not to exhume a century-old study in order to vindicate a critic charged with methodological naïveté, sentimental characterology, or worst of all, "Fluellenism"—a term coined by Richard Levin after the Welsh captain who argued that salmon in the rivers of Monmouth and Macedonia proved Henry V was descended from Alexander the Great.9 Instead, a reading of Much Ado alongside The Courtier evinces the English dramatist's skeptical examination of the source's courtier-ideal, presented in an accessible dramatic form. I will counter Burke's misplaced caution about "the danger of seeing Castiglione everywhere" and his contention that the two texts share little besides [End Page 283] a general sense of style and wit.10 There is more to an intertextual matrix than verbal parallels or one-to-one correspondences between characters like Beatrice and Emilia Pia. Castiglione is "everywhere" in Much Ado, an intellectual presence...

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