Faith and Sheep's Guts in Much Ado About Nothing

Abstract

Critics have generally downplayed the dramatic importance of music in Much Ado About Nothing in comparison to other of Shakespeare's plays, especially the later comedies and romances, yet in Shakespeare's most punning play, figurative references to music are central. In Benedick's response to Balthasar's song in act 2 scene 3 – “Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies” – is a pun that is buried deep enough to be overlooked by modern readers but would not have been inaccessible to the attentive and learned member of Shakespeare's original audience. In this central scene, etymological and cultural associations of music with faith/faithlessness and harmony/discord establish a thematic framework for Benedick's emergence as the agent of fidelity and social harmony in opposition Don John, the agent of discord. This essay begins by establishing Benedick's pun on fidēs (a gut-string for a musical instrument) and fides (faith, loyalty) and its association with a related term, nervus (a sinew or tendon, sometimes used for the string of a musical instrument), in early modern lexicography. The essay then goes on to examine the theoretical association in early modern musicology of music with personal, social, and universal order and harmony; of particular interest is the cultural commonplace that strings made of sheep's and wolf's guts wound together are inevitably and inherently discordant. In this context the antipathy between sheep and wolf gut becomes an emblem for understanding the way in which Shakespeare frames the developing conflict between Benedick and Don John through discord and the re-establishment of social harmony in the marriage of Hero and Claudio.