Much Ado About Nothing
Act V, Scene 2
Leonato’s garden.
Ellen Terry as Beatrice, Oscar Ashe as Benedick
Karl August Büchel, 1903
- Enter Benedick and Margaret, meeting.
Benedick
1 - 2- Pray thee, sweet Mistress Margaret, deserve well at my hands
- by helping me to the speech of Beatrice.
Margaret
3- Will you then write me a sonnet in praise of my beauty?
Benedick
4 - 5- In so high a style, Margaret, that no man living shall come
- over it, for in most comely truth thou deservest it.
Margaret
6 - 7- To have no man come over me? Why, shall I always keep below
- stairs?
Benedick
8- Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound’s mouth, it catches.
Margaret
9 - 10- And yours as blunt as the fencer’s foils, which hit, but
- hurt not.
Benedick
11 - 12- A most manly wit, Margaret, it will not hurt a woman. And so
- I pray thee call Beatrice; I give thee the bucklers.
Margaret
13- Give us the swords, we have bucklers of our own.
Benedick
14 - 15- If you use them, Margaret, you must put in the pikes with a
- vice, and they are dangerous weapons for maids.
Margaret
16- Well, I will call Beatrice to you, who I think hath legs.
- Exit Margaret.
Benedick
17 - 32- And therefore will come.
- Sings.
- “The god of love,
- That sits above,
- And knows me, and knows me,
- How pitiful I deserve”—
- I mean in singing; but in loving, Leander the good swimmer,
- Troilus the first employer of pandars, and a whole bookful
- of these quondam carpet-mongers, whose names yet run
- smoothly in the even road of a blank verse, why, they were
- never so truly turn’d over and over as my poor self in love.
- Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried. I can find
- out no rhyme to “lady” but “baby,” an innocent rhyme; for
- “scorn,” “horn,” a hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool,” a
- babbling rhyme: very ominous endings. No, I was not born
- under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.
- Enter Beatrice.
- Sweet Beatrice, wouldst thou come when I call’d thee?
Beatrice
33- Yea, signior, and depart when you bid me.
Benedick
34- O, stay but till then!
Beatrice
35 - 37- “Then” is spoken; fare you well now. And yet ere I go, let
- me go with that I came, which is, with knowing what hath
- pass’d between you and Claudio.
Benedick
38- Only foul words—and thereupon I will kiss thee.
Beatrice
39 - 41- Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul
- breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart
- unkiss’d.
Benedick
42 - 47- Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so
- forcible is thy wit. But I must tell thee plainly, Claudio
- undergoes my challenge, and either I must shortly hear from
- him, or I will subscribe him a coward. And I pray thee now
- tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in
- love with me?
Only foul words—and thereupon I will kiss thee.
Felix Octavius Carr Darley, 1884
Beatrice
48 - 51- For them all together, which maintain’d so politic a state
- of evil that they will not admit any good part to
- intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did
- you first suffer love for me?
Benedick
52 - 53- Suffer love! A good epithite! I do suffer love indeed, for I
- love thee against my will.
Beatrice
54 - 56- In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart, if you
- spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours, for I will
- never love that which my friend hates.
Benedick
57- Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
Beatrice
58 - 59- It appears not in this confession; there’s not one wise man
- among twenty that will praise himself.
Benedick
60 - 63- An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that liv’d in the time of
- good neighbors. If a man do not erect in this age his own
- tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than
- the bell rings and the widowweeps.
Beatrice
64- And how long is that, think you?
Benedick
65 - 70- Question: why, an hour in clamor and a quarter in rheum;
- therefore is it most expedient for the wise, if Don Worm
- (his conscience) find no impediment to the contrary, to be
- the trumpet of his own virtues, as I am to myself. So much
- for praising myself, who I myself will bear witness is
- praiseworthy. And now tell me, how doth your cousin?
Beatrice
71- Very ill.
Benedick
72- And how do you?
Beatrice
73- Very ill too.
Benedick
74 - 75- Serve God, love me, and mend. There will I leave you too,
- for here comes one in haste.
- Enter Ursula.
Ursula
76 - 80- Madam, you must come to your uncle, yonder’s old coil at
- home. It is prov’d my Lady Hero hath been falsely accus’d,
- the Prince and Claudio mightily abus’d, and Don John is the
- author of all, who is fled and gone. Will you come
- presently?
Beatrice
81- Will you go hear this news, signior?
Benedick
82 - 83- 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.
- Exeunt.
Benedick and Beatrice
Norman M. Price, 1915