Vol. 16 No. 7 1949 - page 710

710
PARTISAN REVIEW
Beatrice are dissemblers who do not know clearly what their com–
mitments may be, although they are aware of the need for commit–
ments. Their insolence to each other is exploratory and fully reckoned.
Beatrice thanks God for her cold blood, and Benedick protests to
her "I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart,
for, truly, I love none." The ironist is the heretic.
By assuming the satyric mask Benedick and Beatrice are playing
the role of boaster or
alazon
as well as the role of mocker. Their inde–
pendence is, as Nietzsche would say, a privilege of the strong-and,
in circumspect Messina, a transgression of the sentimental code. They
have unwittingly been forced into a comic
hubris,
a heterodoxy, a
pretension that they can occupy only with increasing difficulty. In
the Forest of Arden, Rosalind escaped this peril because she never
denied that she was woman and that her disguise was one of the hard
uses of adversity. These Socratic dissemblers have too arrogantly
exempted themselves from the herd!morality. Beatrice is certain that
she will not run mad till a hot January; Adam's sons are her brethren,
and she
will
not match her kindred; besides, she can see a church
by daylight. Benedick is more presumptuous: Love will never make
an oyster of him; "he shall never make me such a fool. One woman
is fair, yet I am well; another is wise, yet I am well; another
vir–
tuous, yet I am well; but till all graces be in one woman, one woman
shall not come in my grace." With the irony of Meredithian tactics,
he asks whether he shall never see a bachelor of threescore again. Of
course the ,assumption of the role of
alazon
is at least in part an
affectation; we know that before the play opens there has already
been a passage or two of hearts between them. The dilemma, how–
ever, remains: the comic fauns have been betrayed into posing as
boasters-the Philistines in Messina would say as destroyers, nihilists.
They have permitted themselves a single but unmistakable Nietzschean
gesture.
Hence the full transformation, the completed metamorphosis,
from
eiron
to clown, an entirely Socratic reversal occurring with the
recognition or "discovery" that humbles the comic spirit itself and
causes the dissembler to drop
his
mask. He no longer
plays
the fool.
He
is
the fool. Socrates the heretic often suffered a revelation that
compelled him to abandon his profession of ignorance or skepticism
and speak by an affirmative myth as of something known but not
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