Much Ado about Planking
44 CHRISTINE HOFFMANN DON PEDRO
First, I ask thee what they have done, thirdly, I ask thee what’s their offense, sixth and lastly, why they are committed, and to conclude, what you lay to their charge.30
More mockery from Don Pedro, but as Borachio’s bonds should tell him, Dogberry’s roundabout way is the better way; his creative (if not fully intentional) violation of normative procedure does far more good than Don Pedro’s routine adherence. Borachio asserts as much when he says that “[w]hat your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.”31 Indeed, long before this scene, without Dogberry to keep them “vigitant,”32 Don Pedro and Claudio fall into normative ethics even before gaining proximity to Hero’s alleged disloyalty:
CLAUDIO
If I see any thing to-night why I should not marry her, to-morrow in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her.
DON PEDRO
And as I woo’d for thee to obtain her, I will join with thee to disgrace her.33
“How if you will not?” one wishes a Watchman would pop his head into the scene to inquire, for Claudio and Don Pedro need to be catechized. They show themselves unprepared for the strangeness of an intimate encounter and the generous ethics such an encounter demands. “The world is real,”
writes Morton, “but not because you can kick it,”34 or shame it in a church.
ultimately, even more than Dogberry and the Watch, it is Beatrice and Benedick, things among things, who prove capable of thriving within a strange environment that must remain inaccessible—as the eavesdrop-ping Benedick must remain inaccessible to the gentlemen, as the “right”
word must remain inaccessible to Dogberry and the Watch—if they are 30 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 5.1.213–223.
31 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 5.1.232–34 32 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 3.3.94.
33 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 3.2.123–27.
34 Morton, “Here Comes Everything,” 167.
MuCH ADO ABOuT PLANKINg 45 to have any meaningful designs on / with /for it. “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,” Benedick suggests to Beatrice in Act 5;35 even wiser to say that nothing woos peaceably in this play. Relationships are built on error, compulsion or speculation. But if the last act of Much Ado teaches us anything, it is that these speculations can be productive, and making much ado about nothing can be an exercise not in tragedy but in con-structive humility, the kind that compels us to imagine ethics as locative rather than normative, dealing in metaphors more than certainties. As we can imagine the endurance of a block or plank, the vitality of a visor, we can imagine the “fire in [our] ears” as we choose to be suddenly, “horribly in love”;36 it is through props (humor) that characters learn the moves for a non-normative ethics—horribly strange, but ultimately necessary for progress, for reform, for love.
Whatever props occupy the eavesdropping scenes of Much Ado, the best productions will emphasize their proximity, the ways in which objects are integral to and invested in a scene, even if also withdrawn. As Jane Ben-nett reminds us, “No one really knows what human agency is,” so “how can we be so sure that the processes through which nonhumans make their mark are qualitatively different?”37 uncertainty and inaccessibil-ity is the point. We can project “violence or ardor” between piston and fuel, says Bogost, but this is “the human metaphorization of a phenom-enon, not the ethics of an object. It is not the relationship between piston and fuel that we frame by ethics but our relationship to the relationship between piston and fuel.”38 Likewise, the best that Beatrice and Benedick can do by the play’s last act is figure out their relationship to their rela-tionship; “here’s our own hands against our hearts,” Benedick says of the love poems each discover the other has written.39 They accept the impreci-sion of this relationship and so accept each other, at the same time tak-ing the Friar’s advice to “let wonder seem familiar.”40 The preparation for this acceptance, however, occurs throughout the play, through every object lesson, every strangely intimate encounter that inspires in the
35 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 5.2.72.
36 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 3.1.107; 2.3.235.
37 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 34.
38 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 78.
39 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 5.4.91–92.
40 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 5.4.70.
46 CHRISTINE HOFFMANN
actors, equally, negligence and perseverance—encounters that are based on nothing but might mean everything.
BENEDICK
I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange?
BEATRICE
As strange as the thing I know not.41
Here the lovers, in confessing their love, also confess that strangeness is a part of intimacy. It intrudes into all our careful designs. It is invited.
41 Shakespeare, Much Ado, 4.1.267–269.
Our own genome probably carries hundreds of thousands of such stowaways. The boundary between [disease] and the
‘normal genome’ is quite blurred; intrinsic to our own ancestry and nature are not only Adam and Eve, but any number of invisible germs that have crept into our chromosomes.
—Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Laureate for Medicine1
This humanoid stick figure in profile (see figure 1, next page) is the image used for Wikipedia’s entry “Plague (disease).”2 The uncanny resemblance to a human highlights the zombie-like objectness of the microbe: it is alive, like a human, but it is also essentially an immobile object; its movements are as imperceptibly microscopic as it is. Further, plague seems to cross the territory between life and death: it returns after years, even centuries, of dormancy—seemingly absent after the eighth century Justinian y. pestis outbreak only to remerge with even more viru-lence in the fourteenth century as the Black Death. Its very nature seems to invite us to think of plague as both alive and dead; incapable of chas-ing its prey, plague spreads and kills with terrifychas-ing efficiency whenever it rises from its own grave-like dormancy. This slightly altered image of 1 Joshua Lederberg, “Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon,” in In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease, ed.
Arien Mack (New York: NYU Press, 1991), 27–8.
2 From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, courtesy of Larry Stauffer.
“Details - Public Health Image Library (PHIL),” accessed June 11, 2014, http://phil.
cdc.gov/phil/details.asp?pid=1918. This is a public domain image. I have rotated it about forty-five degrees, cropped it round, and blurred its edges.