Much Ado About Nothing characters are divided between two love stories: Beatrice and Benedick, who insist they will never marry and argue their way into love, and Hero and Claudio, who fall in love almost without speaking and are nearly destroyed by a lie.
Around them are a prince who arranges other people’s marriages, his resentful brother, a proud father, and a constable whose mangled English uncovers the truth. This guide covers every major character in Much Ado About Nothing, grouped by the parts they play in the story, with the key lines that reveal each one. For the plot act by act, the themes, and the play’s most famous lines, see our full guide to Much Ado About Nothing.
At a Glance
Here are the major characters in Much Ado About Nothing and their roles in the play.
The Merry War: Beatrice and Benedick
Leonato warns a messenger in the first scene that “there is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.” The two are the play’s great talkers, and most of their wit is in prose.
Beatrice
Beatrice is Leonato’s niece and ward, and her first line is a jab at Benedick, whom she calls “Signior Mountanto.” She mocks marriage as freely as she mocks him: “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.” When Don Pedro half seriously offers himself as a husband, she turns him down with a joke (“Your Grace is too costly to wear every day”) and apologizes for her tongue: “I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.” Her wit may hide an old wound. Benedick, she says, once won her heart “with false dice.”
Tricked into overhearing that Benedick loves her, Beatrice gives up her scorn in a rare moment of rhymed verse: “Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu!” Her real test comes at the wedding. When Claudio shames Hero and even Leonato believes the charge, Beatrice is the first to declare her cousin innocent: “O, on my soul, my cousin is belied!” Her fury at the men who slandered her cousin produces the play’s most famous command, “Kill Claudio,” and her bitterest lines: “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.” Beatrice can do nothing herself (“I cannot be a man with wishing; therefore I will die a woman with grieving”), so she makes Benedick choose between his friend and her.
Benedick
Benedick of Padua is a soldier in Don Pedro’s army and a declared enemy of marriage. He calls Beatrice “my dear Lady Disdain,” swears he “will live a bachelor,” and invites his friends to paint a sign over him reading “Here you may see Benedick the married man” if he ever gives in. Hidden in the arbor, he overhears his friends describe Beatrice’s secret passion for him, and he convinces himself at once: “This can be no trick.” His reversal is one of the funniest speeches in the play: “The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”
Benedick grows up at the wedding. He keeps a cool head when the accusation is made, guessing that “The practice of it lives in John the Bastard,” and when Beatrice demands that he kill Claudio, he first refuses (“Ha! Not for the wide world”) and then asks one question: “Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?” Her answer is enough. “Enough, I am engaged. I will challenge him.” He breaks with the Prince and challenges his friend in earnest. In the last act, he admits he cannot write a love poem (“I was not born under a rhyming planet”), and near the end he advises the Prince, “Get thee a wife, get thee a wife.”
The Young Lovers: Hero and Claudio
The main plot follows a young couple who hardly speak to each other before their wedding. Their courtship is arranged by others, and so is its near destruction.
Hero
Hero is Leonato’s daughter and, as Don Pedro points out, “his only heir.” In company, she is quiet, and she is often spoken about more than she speaks. Among women, though, she is lively and sharp. When she and Ursula trick Beatrice in the orchard, she delivers a long, clever speech about her cousin’s pride, and she ends the scene with a neat couplet: “Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.” On her wedding morning, she admits that her “heart is exceeding heavy.”
At the altar, Hero is given almost no chance to defend herself. She asks, “Is my lord well that he doth speak so wide?” She denies the charge plainly (“I talked with no man at that hour, my lord”) and faints. Her father cries, “Let her die!” Friar Francis believes her, and she is reported dead until her name is cleared. When she unmasks at the second wedding, she speaks with new dignity: “One Hero died defiled, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid.” Many modern readers find it hard that she takes Claudio back, and productions often search for a way to make her forgiveness believable.
Claudio
Claudio is a young Florentine who has won honor in the war, “doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion.” He falls for Hero at a glance (“Can the world buy such a jewel?”), but he asks Don Pedro whether Leonato has a son before he commits himself, and he lets the Prince do his wooing for him. His trust is thin. At the masked dance, Don John tells him the Prince is wooing Hero for himself, and Claudio believes it immediately: “Let every eye negotiate for itself / And trust no agent.”
When Don John shows him a man at Hero’s window, Claudio plans a public revenge, and at the wedding he hands her back to her father: “Give not this rotten orange to your friend.” Afterward he jokes about the grieving old men who challenge him. Only when Borachio confesses does he feel remorse: “Sweet Hero, now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I loved it first.” He accepts Leonato’s penance, and he agrees to marry Leonato’s “niece” sight unseen. Many readers find Claudio hard to like, and his defenders point mostly to his youth and to how thoroughly he is deceived.
The Prince, His Brother, and the Governor
The older men of the play hold the power in Messina. They arrange marriages, believe accusations, and pass judgments, and they are easily fooled.
Don Pedro
Don Pedro, the Prince of Aragon, is the play’s great matchmaker. He woos Hero in disguise on Claudio’s behalf, and then he sets himself “one of Hercules’ labors”: to bring Beatrice and Benedick “into a mountain of affection.” If the scheme works, he says, “we are the only love gods.” He is generous and good-humored, but he is as easily deceived as Claudio. After seeing the scene at the window, he declares at the wedding, “I stand dishonored that have gone about / To link my dear friend to a common stale.”
For all his matchmaking, Don Pedro ends the play alone. He playfully asks Beatrice to marry him and is turned down, and in the last scene Benedick tells him, “Prince, thou art sad. Get thee a wife.” The news that arrives a moment later is about his brother, who has been caught and brought back to Messina.
Don John
Don John is Don Pedro’s illegitimate brother, recently “reconciled” with him after standing out against him in war. His first speech includes the six words “I am not of many words,” and he refuses to pretend: “it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain.” He would rather “be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace.” He hates Claudio because “That young start-up hath all the glory of my overthrow.”
Don John is a small villain in a large play. He appears in only a handful of scenes, pays Borachio a thousand ducats to stage the scene at the window, and flees Messina before the truth comes out. His villainy needs no deeper motive than spite, and his quick success says as much about the men who believe him as about him.
Leonato
Leonato, the governor of Messina, is a warm, joking host. Asked if Hero is his daughter, he answers, “Her mother hath many times told me so,” and he plays his part in tricking Benedick with such conviction that Benedick trusts him: “I should think this a gull but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it.” At the wedding, however, he believes the accusation against his own child at once. He cries, “Hath no man’s dagger here a point for me?” and when Hero revives, he tells her, “Do not live, Hero.”
His grief is real, and he recovers his faith in his daughter. In Act 5, he rejects comfort from anyone who would “Patch grief with proverbs,” challenges Claudio despite his age, and then, once Hero’s innocence is proved, devises the penance that ends the play: Claudio must hang an epitaph on Hero’s tomb and marry Leonato’s “niece,” who is Hero in disguise. His brother, sometimes called Antonio, joins him in challenging Claudio (“Boys, apes, braggarts, jacks, milksops!”) and plays the bride’s father at the second wedding.
The Plotters and the Watch
The lie that breaks the wedding is carried out by servants, and it is uncovered by the least impressive men in Messina.
Dogberry and Verges
Dogberry is the master constable of Messina, and Verges is his elderly partner. Dogberry’s speech is full of words that mean the opposite of what he intends: he calls one watchman the “most senseless and fit man” for the job, tells them that talking “is most tolerable and not to be endured,” and informs Verges, in front of Leonato, that “Comparisons are odorous.” His instructions to the watch amount to avoiding any trouble at all. Yet his men overhear Borachio boasting of the plot and arrest him.
Dogberry nearly wastes the discovery. He tries to tell Leonato before the wedding but is so tedious that Leonato sends him away, and at the examination he is more offended at being called an ass than interested in the crime: “O, that he were here to write me down an ass!” Borachio sums up the comedy of it when he confesses: “What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.”
Borachio and Conrade
Borachio, whose name comes from a Spanish word for a drunkard, is Don John’s follower and the author of the plot. Fittingly, he gives the plot away while drinking, promising “like a true drunkard” to “utter all.” He arranges for Margaret to appear at Hero’s window at night, calling her by her lady’s name, while Don Pedro and Claudio watch from below. His companion Conrade is Don John’s other confidant. Borachio is caught because he cannot resist boasting, and when he is exposed, he confesses fully and clears Margaret of any knowing part.
Margaret and Ursula
Margaret is Hero’s waiting gentlewoman, a quick, bawdy talker who teases Beatrice about “carduus benedictus,” a medicinal herb whose name puns on Benedick. She is the woman Claudio sees at the window, and Borachio insists she “knew not what she did.” Ursula, another of Hero’s gentlewomen, helps trick Beatrice in the orchard and later brings the news that Hero has been cleared.
Other Characters
Friar Francis, the priest at the wedding, watches Hero closely while she is accused and trusts what he sees in her face. He proposes that Leonato announce her death, reasoning that Claudio will value her once he has lost her: “Come, lady, die to live.” Balthasar is Don Pedro’s musician, who sings “Sigh no more, ladies” while Benedick hides in the arbor. The Sexton, or town clerk, is the one sensible official at the examination, and he carries the evidence to Leonato.
A Closer Reading: “Speak, Count, ’Tis Your Cue”
When Don Pedro announces that Hero is won, and Leonato gives her to Claudio, the bridegroom says nothing. Beatrice has to prompt him:
Speak, count, ’tis your cue.
Claudio answers that “Silence is the perfectest herald of joy,” and Hero says nothing at all. Beatrice prompts her too: “Speak, cousin, or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss.” Then she reports what Hero is whispering in Claudio’s ear. The two lovers of the main plot court almost without words. Claudio asks the Prince to woo for him, and the Prince teases him that lovers “tire the hearer with a book of words.” In the whole play, Hero does not speak a line to Claudio until their wedding, when she answers the Friar and then tells Claudio she knows of no impediment: “None, my lord.” At the dance, she even asks her masked partner to “say nothing.”
Beatrice and Benedick court the opposite way. They do almost nothing but talk, and their words are weapons: “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs,” Benedick complains. Yet it is the silent couple who prove fragile. Because Claudio and Hero never learned to speak to each other, other people’s words fill the space between them. Don John’s whisper at the dance and his story of the window are enough to undo a love that has never been tested in conversation. At the altar, Claudio finally finds his eloquence, and he uses it to destroy her. Hero, who has had so little practice speaking up for herself, manages a few short replies and faints. Her father reads even that as guilt: “She not denies it.”
By the end, each couple has borrowed something from the other. Claudio and Hero speak their vows to each other at last, and Hero gets the stronger lines: “One Hero died defiled, but I do live.” Beatrice and Benedick, on the other hand, are finally silenced. When their love poems are produced and they are still trading insults, Benedick, in most modern editions, ends the argument the way Beatrice once advised her cousin: “Peace! I will stop your mouth,” and he kisses her. The talkers learn when to stop talking, and the quiet lovers learn, at great cost, to speak.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in Much Ado About Nothing, answered briefly.
Who Is the Main Character in Much Ado About Nothing?
The plot centers on Hero and Claudio, whose wedding Don John tries to ruin. But Beatrice and Benedick have the liveliest roles and the best-known lines, and audiences often think of the play as theirs.
Why Does Claudio Believe Hero Is Unfaithful?
Don John takes him and Don Pedro to watch Hero’s window on the night before the wedding. There, they see Borachio courting Margaret, who is dressed in Hero’s clothes, and they take her for Hero.
Why Does Don John Want to Ruin the Wedding?
Out of spite. He resents his brother, against whom he has recently rebelled, and he hates Claudio, who has “all the glory of my overthrow.” He calls himself “a plain-dealing villain” and offers no deeper reason.
Did Beatrice and Benedick Have a Past?
The play hints at one. Beatrice tells Don Pedro that Benedick once “lent” her his heart and that “once before he won it of me with false dice.” The line suggests an earlier romance that ended badly, though the play gives no details.
Who Is Dogberry?
The master constable of Messina, famous for using grand words wrongly. His night watch overhears Borachio boasting about the plot against Hero, and the arrest they make eventually clears her name.
Related Reading
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