708
PARTISAN REVIEW
with proverbs, their eye for opportunity and decency. The comedy
is
frequently chilly and limited to the unconscious irony of Claudio's
exclamation when he publicly shames Hero: "0, what men dare do!
What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!"
In frivolous Messina the comic triumph is often simply the opportunity
to abuse weakness, as when Claudio contemptuously fears that two
old men, the injured and feeble Leonato and Antonio, may, without
their teeth, snap off his nose.
This philistine and hollow respectability, with its sentimentalism,
may be expected to provoke insurgence, if not a destructive Nietz–
schean comedy. And in fact Messina has produced its own immoralist;
not in the trim and callow Claudio but in the bastard Don John,
who is a sort of alien Negation, a frank will to power. His responses
are Nietzschean rather than Machiavellian: "Though I cannot be
said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am
a plain-dealing villain.
If
I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had
my liberty, I would do my liking." The comedy does not complete
this Nietzschean transvaluation of respectability into the "unmasking
of Christian morality." Nevertheless the nihilism of Don John
is
always there in the background-sometimes to be felt as a Mephi–
stophelian mischief, an unconditioned violence. Don John, like Iago,
is the tempter. This inherent Nietzschean dialectic in the play is left
unresolved, for at the end Benedick persuades Messina not to think
of Don John until tomorrow and promises to devise brave punish–
ments for him. It is curious that the discipline of Don John should
be left to the undisciplined Benedick, since in this effete society
he and Beatrice share the bastard's high animal spirit-and they,
like him, are alien from the gross proprieties of the city, which are
maintained as a kind of reference for the comedy. The local respect–
abilities are always being threatened by Beatrice and Benedick as
well as by the mischiefs of Don John and Borachio; the thoroughly
conceived dishonoring of Hero is followed hard by the challenge to
Claudio, a challenge obviously awkward and discomforting to an
easygoing, evasive society. These violences are the unexpected crashes
of the outer world, the world beyond the comic enclosure; there are
similar reverberations within
Measure tor Measure
and
All's Well
That Ends Well.
They are the crashes not often heard on the Mere–
dithian scene. The outer world also crashed in upon the end of the
