Much Ado About Nothing

Masks appear in two of the play’s pivotal scenes. Don Pedro woos Hero on Claudio’s behalf at a masked ball. (At that same ball, Beatrice fires off a volley of insults at a masked Benedick under the pretense that she doesn’t know he is the person under the mask.) And at the end of the play, Hero, pretending to be her fictional cousin, refuses to remove her mask until Claudio has agreed to marry her sight unseen.

In these instances, masks symbolize the shifty nature of reality itself. The truth, the masks suggest, is often slippery and hidden—a fact that makes the characters at once anxious and foolish. As they trick one another, believe what they want to believe, and hear only what they want to hear, truth often goes masked in falsehood, and falsehood masked in truth.

When a chastened Claudio agrees to marry a masked woman without seeing her face, his decision marks a shift in the play’s portrayal of truth. By this point, Claudio has accepted that his sense of what is true has often been self-deceiving and destructive; now, he is prepared to humbly embrace uncertainty. “I am your husband if you like of me,” he tells the masked lady—and finds that, after all, she is the wife he wanted all along (5.4.59).

Beatrice and Benedick’s eventual public declaration of love for each other is likewise a symbolic unmasking. Everyone but them has known they loved each other all along, but it takes courage for them to expose that vulnerable truth, especially having learned, watching Hero and Claudio, how fragile love can be.