0;witty” female character such as Beatrice as a main character was an accepted occurrence in Shakespeare’s plays. Prose predominates in comedy and where a conversational rather than an emotional or imaginative effect if desired, this strengthens the argument that Much Ado is a comedy. Shakespeare wrote the play mostly in prose form except for scenes of extreme emotion and feeling, “could she here deny…thou wouldst not quickly die” as when Hero’s unfaithfulness was enlightened at the church to Leonato. When a character has strong emotions of happiness or sadness, Shakespeare uses poetry to highlight the heightened feelings and often allows characters long and uninterrupted speeches of poetry to express themselves more clearly and with feeling. Comic scenes lighten the play and contain some sexual innuendo and many witty remarks and exchanges between the characters, Leonato answering, “Her mother hath many times told me so” when the Prince presented Hero to Leonato. Some of the characters have a language device as Dogberry with his malapropisms “our sexton hath reformed Signior Leonato”, the awkward language of the watch, and Beatrice and Bene*censored* have their witty exchanges of conversation interwoven with insults and teasing. The opening scene contains the comic imagery of animals when Bene*censored* says that Beatrice has the “tongue” of a “parrot” to which it is replied that Bene*censored* is himself a “beast”, the exchanges are witty and somewhat insulting towards each other. Beatrice also mocks Bene*censored* and his sexual appetite when asking, “How many hath he kill’d and eaten in these wars?”The contrasts of vocabulary in the comic scenes to the darker scenes are great; the darker scenes are short and blunt without any joking or good-humour. The tragic scenes contain none of the good-humour or light-heartedness in...
