NIETZSCHE AND SOCRATES IN M'ESSINA
709
Socratic comedy, for beneath the giddiness of Athens were suppressed
violences: the Melians had been butchered, and the Thirty had shed
domestic blood, and the gods were held in precarious reverence.
The comic reduction of Messina is not, however, committed to
the hands of the Nietzschean Don John but to the Meredithian fauns
Benedick and Beatrice with their impious glee in preying upon affec–
tation; it is like the robust, disorderly jibing of Mercutio. But the
fauns become clowns- they suffer metamorphosis into a Socratic
phase. Thus the Meredithian triumph is also a humanization.
As
scapegoats and fools these comic spirits prove themselves, like Socrates,
adequate to the tragic occasion, and the comic catharsis is per–
formed not entirely by their luminous impudence but also by humility,
their recognition of the good through experience of evil and uncer–
tainty. The fauns are victimized by their own integrity and innocence;
yet their own folly becomes a daemonic wisdom against which we
can calculate the hypocrisies and indecencies of Messina.
When the comedy opens, Beatrice and Benedick are sustaining
their integrity against the conventionality and emptiness of Messina,
and its mechanical responses, by assuming the mask of the dissembler,
the ironist, whose negation is not the immoralism of Don John but
the detachment and watchfulness of the comic satyr. Their detach–
ment is already a little ambiguous- they already have been allowed
the immunity extended to the fool. They have arrived at a relation–
ship that excludes others; they keep up their merry war in which they
intuit but deny the identity of their interests. They court vituperation
because it relieves the tensions strung high by the sophistications of
their society. In this saturnalia (Don Pedro is Lord of Misrule) Bea–
trice and Benedick have put on motley-and communication with
the fool is at the primitive level of vituperation. They certainly will
not yield themselves at all to the conveniences of Leonato and An–
tonio, or Don Pedro either. Beatrice is able to evade even the evasive
Don Pedro, whose formal and polite investigations she promptly and
courteously checks: "Your Grace is too costly to wear every day. But,
I beseech your Grace, pardon me; I was born to speak all mirth and
no matter." This is the mask of the jester by which she earns her
inviolability. Benedick does not wear this mask so easily. He is said
not to
be
able to maintain his part-that of the "obstinate heretic in
the despite of beauty"-except by the force of his will. He and
