Post 2: After reading Act III

So far, my predictions about the characters have been spot on. Benedick and Beatrice are two confirmed bachelors, who are in a kind of merry war betwixt them. They scorn love, and swear they will never marry. Evidently they are in love with each other; they just don’t know it yet. At least that is what their friends think, for Don Pedro, Hero, Claudio and Leonato decide to resort to a ploy and try to convince Benedick that Beatrice is in love with him, and vice versa.

The other characters I like best so far are Dogberry and Verges. They are two watchmen who provide comic relief. They bring humour to the play by their misuse of words, often by confusing two words of similar sound.

The play starts as a happy comedy, one in which misunderstandings and eavesdropping set the plot in motion. But at the end of Act 3, the villain is about to be successful, having led Claudio and Don Pedro to believe that Hero is not chaste. Therefore, the atmosphere of the play grows dark, as Claudio and Don Pedro intend to shame Hero publicly, exposing her as a slut.

Humour is achieved through the use of witty ditties, puns, and extended metaphors which amount to analogies. There are also malapropisms (incorrect uses of words) via Dogberry. As regards the use of verse and prose, we can observe that prose is predominant in the play, with verse restricted to serious matters, and only spoken by aristocratic characters.

BENEDICK Ha, against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner:
there's a double meaning in that: I took no more pains for those
thanks than you took pains to thank me: that's as much as to say, any
pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks: if I do not take pity of
her I am a villain, if I do not love her I am a Jew, I will go get her
picture.

I choose this quotation because it is simply hilarious. After having been tricked into believing that Beatrice is madly in love with him, Benedick sees second meanings where there are none.