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I’m delighted to share dramatis personae’s first guest post, written by my wonderful friend and wonderful scholar Emily MacLeod!

Margaret in Much Ado about Nothing is such a nuisance that most theatre directors probably wish she didn’t appear in the play at all. Her dialogue frequently gets cut out as much as possible, yet she is often added to scenes where she does not originally appear. The plot needs her, but the play doesn’t really know what to do with her. Her most significant action occurs offstage and is only described and referred to by others, never by herself. We don’t know what she thinks or feels about being pulled into Don John’s sabotage of Hero and Claudio’s nuptial celebrations. In order to remedy these strange absences, directors sometimes decide to add her into the background of scenes, but that just creates more logistical problems. 

She can certainly replace Ursula (an even more bland servant of Hero’s) in the scene where they trick Beatrice into thinking that Benedick is in love with her. But if Margaret is present at the wedding, what can the audience make of her silence when Hero’s supposed infidelity is exposed? Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film both creates this problem and then tries to solve it. She runs away in shame from the ceremony, since she cannot (according to the script) interrupt to tell the truth that it was her and not Hero at the window the night before. She is not listed in the stage directions of the original text in the entrance to the wedding scene, though her absence from stage directions hasn’t stopped her from appearing in scenes before. Her first lines in Act 2 are spoken without any indication of when she enters the scene. It is in these curious absences from the text and curiouser appearances in productions that Margaret (from the sidelines) wreaks the most havoc on this play. 

The textual traces of Margaret’s first appearance in the play sets the stage for her confusing presence throughout its production history and how productions have tried to make sense of her. In both the Quarto (1600) and Folio (1623) texts, she is thrust into the dancing at the party without any introduction – the audience doesn’t know her name or who she is. She converses with Benedick for a few lines and switches mid-conversation from talking to “Bene” to “Balth,” presumably Balthasar, the musician. It must be remembered that speech headings in early Shakespeare printed texts are not free of error. They can at times be disregarded and replaced with a more logical speaker. Editors sometimes opt to assign the entire exchange to Balthasar. This omission leaves Benedick’s witty flirting reserved for Beatrice alone. But the later exchange in Act 5 between Margaret and Benedick when he asks her to fetch Beatrice (a dialogue that gets very saucy and is also often cut) suggests some kind of relationship between the two of them. Productions (including Branagh’s) often give the scene at the party completely to Borachio, a dramaturgical choice that sets up the pairing of him and Margaret for their rendezvous. It makes sense to “match” her with him, though this foreshadowing was evidently not deemed necessary for Shakespeare’s own audience. 

The scene where Ursula, Margaret, and Beatrice dress Hero before her wedding to Claudio (3.4) is one of those rare scenes in a Shakespeare play where no men appear, and it is here where Margaret speaks the most. The conversation quickly turns to the impending wedding night, and Margaret pivots from passive aggressive comments on the bride’s apparel to sexual innuendo. Now that Beatrice is “sick” with love, Margaret must fill her place as the resident wit-cracker. The humor of the wordplay she uses is all but lost on a modern audience, no matter the valiant attempts of an actor to make it funny, and is often cut down considerably. [It should be noted that similarly archaic jokes are often preserved when delivered by male characters, like Dogberry…] Indeed this whole scene of the women together is often, as in Branagh, sacrificed to the theatre gods. Excising it deprives the audience of a playful and upbeat scene while they anticipate the catastrophe of the wedding that is to come, almost like a horror movie where characters are blithely ignorant of impending doom. The teasing of Beatrice here mirrors the scene where the men tease Benedick for shaving. When it is cut, Margaret becomes practically speechless in the play and is only used as an offstage puppet in Don John’s plot. 

Margaret’s actions on the night before Hero’s wedding set up the rest of the play. Borachio reports that “she leans me out at her mistress' chamber-window” and “bids me a thousand times good night” as Don Pedro and Claudio, believing her to be Hero, watch from a distance in horror. [Both recent films, Branagh’s and Joss Whedon’s, show the silhouette of Borachio and Margaret’s embrace from Claudio’s perspective, as if to make the ruse plausible to the audience. “See, guys, she really does look like Hero!”] Borachio says that he calls Margaret “Hero,” and she will call him “Claudio.” I hate to quibble on what is already a ridiculous plot device, but a) why would this “Hero” call her illicit lover the name of her fiancé? And b) why, in reality, would Margaret agree to call Borachio Claudio? What kind of weird roleplay are these people into?  Anyway, Margaret is cleared of blame in all of this mess when Borachio swears that she knew nothing of the plot. The father Leonato seems to be the only one concerned with getting her side of the story, though that reckoning is never staged. In Branagh’s film, Leonato has clearly forgiven her at the end as he kisses her on the forehead and hastily ushers her with the other women toward the final wedding scene. (Okay but where WAS Hero that night, and why wasn’t Beatrice with her?)

Margaret appears in the text in 5 scenes, 3 where she speaks more than 1 line, and 2 that are almost always cut in production. That leaves only a couple appearances, and sometimes just a few lines to establish her as a character. The process that an actor needs in order to play Margaret as a fully realized human being requires certain mental gymnastics. What makes it all the more challenging is that even the preservation of her voice in the play does not actually solve any of its structural problems. What she is given to speak holds no real value to the movement of the plot, and thus she is relegated to the sidelines, a pesky necessary presence who directors contend with in puzzling ways. Margaret may not be at fault for this, but Shakespeare definitely is. 

Emily MacLeod is a PhD candidate at the George Washington University and a freelance dramaturg and director. You can find more of her Shakespearean musings here. Previous directing projects at the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp and Brave Spirits Theatre are available to watch here. You can find her on Twitter @essm714.

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