Much Ado

Prepping simultaneously for The Great Divorce and Much Ado About Nothing. Was wondering why Much Ado ends the way it does, and thought that what I was reading with my students today in GD sheds some light on it.

Benedick: [...] And now tell me, how doth your cousin?

Beatrice: Very ill.

Benedick: And how do you?

Beatrice: Very ill, too.

Benedick: Serve God, love me, and mend.

(V.iii)

Prince:
How dost thou, Benedick, the married man?

Benedick: I'll tell thee what, prince: a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humor. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? [...] In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it. For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.

[...]

Messenger: [to Prince]
My Lord, your brother John is ta'en in flight,
And brought with armed men back to Messina.

Benedick: [to Prince] Think not on him till tomorrow. I'll devise thee brave punishments for him.--Strike up, pipers!

[Music plays. They dance.]
[They exit.]
Finis.

(V.iv)

"What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved."

"Ye see it does not."

"I feel in a way that it ought to."

"That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it."

"What?"

"The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven."

"I do not know what I want, Sir."

"Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness the reject for themselves."

(Great Divorce, Chapter 13)


That's all. G'night!

A