Beatrice and Benedick's Merry War, Explained：merry war

What's really going on

On the surface this is household business: a letter, a list of honours, and a famous guest arriving. Underneath, the scene establishes the pleasure and the danger of talk in Messina. The messenger's formal report — Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called Claudio — gives Leonato's house its news, but Beatrice turns the same event into a joke about Benedick. She asks how many men he has killed and eaten in these wars, then treats him as a contagious disease: 'He will hang upon him like a disease!' Leonato supplies the key description when he warns that there is 'a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her.' The wit is not decoration; it is how the play defines its central pair. Even before Benedick appears, Beatrice has him fixed in her sights, and the language of skirmish and disease shows affection and mockery running on the same current.

Theme

このチャプターで学べること

• Wit here is a weapon, not small talk.
• Praise for a soldier is measured in feats, not years.
• Beatrice's questions mock more than they ask.

発音のポイント

• figure of a lamb — Link figure of a so it runs together as one sound.
• betwixt Signior — The final t of betwixt tends to drop before Signior.
• cost him — Cost and him blend, with the h nearly silent.