By 1600, as we know from the play’s quarto edition, it had been ‘sundrie times publicly acted’. We also know that it was considered appropriate entertainment for the royal court when, in 1613, it was one of twenty plays laid on as part of the festivities marking the marriage of James 1’s daughter Elizabeth to Prince Frederick of Bohemia. One young member of the audience enjoying the performance was the future King Charles 1. In future years, he would scribble ‘Benedicte and Betteris’ against the play’s title in his 1632 Folio edition of the plays, indicating where his particular interest and enjoyment lay. Another indication of the popularity of the pair from what is, after all, only the subplot, comes in a verse eulogy included in the edition of Shakespeare’s poems in 1640:
‘ … ……let but Beatrice
And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice,
The Cockpit, galleries, boxes all are full.’
The play’s first performances were played out in daylight on the simple thrust stage of an Elizabethan playhouse. The lack of scenery was a help rather than a hindrance in allowing fast-paced, fluid action and a focus on the players and on the language. Music, costume and a few necessary props were all else that was required. The roles of Beatrice, Hero and their gentlewomen were written for boy players. Shakespeare wrote his plays with the strengths and talents of his fellow players in mind and he was clearly fortunate in having some supremely gifted boys in the company.
By the late seventeenth century, the play, like so many others after the Restoration, was judged in need of improvement to suit contemporary taste and sensibility. William Davenant came up with the title The Law Against Lovers for his adaptation, the result of an unlikely partnership with Measure for Measure. Hero was no longer present and Beatrice now a rich heiress. Pepys saw this in 1662 and considered it ‘a good play’.
Throughout the 1700's various versions of Shakespeare's play were presented in London - at Lincoln's Inn Field, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. David Garrick had great success as Benedick at Drury Lane, keeping it in his repertoire every year from 1748 until his retirement in 1776. Notable Beatrices of the period included Frances Abington, still playing the role in her sixties, and Dorothy Jordan, who won particular praise for the buoyant good spirits of her performance. This resilient energy clearly extended to the actress’s private life since, during the same period, she also found the time and energy to produce ten children for her royal lover, the Duke of Clarence. Fanny Kemble and Helen Faucit were famous exponents of the role in the nineteenth century but the most successful pairing of this time was undoubtedly that of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre.
Their production ran for 212 performances in the early 1880s, before going on to tour America. It satisfied the public taste for lavish and picturesque sets and costumes and Irving cleverly manipulated the play to supply pleasing 'curtains' on which to end a scene in such a way that a crowd-pleasing effect was achieved, at the expense of Shakespeare's more subtle original. One such example of a 'traditional gag', as Ellen Terry unhappily called it, was used to bring down the fourth act. It was the insertion of
Beatrice Benedick, kill him – kill him if you can.
Benedick As sure as I'm alive I will.
This always got a laugh from the audience and Irving refused to relinquish it in favour of the emotionally charged restraint of Shakespeare’s final lines for the scene. Terry also felt that 'Beatrice must be swift, swift, swift!' but she was hindered in this by her leading man's slow and deliberate style of playing Benedick. Despite the constraints of playing within a production controlled by the male impresario, Terry still succeeded in winning the praise of discerning theatregoers. One such wrote years later: 'Others have had gaiety and humour, grace and vivacity, tenderness, dignity and deep feeling but not as Ellen Terry had them.'
The prevailing style of nineteenth-century productions, without the likes of Ellen Terry to deepen their humanity, might, perhaps, be summed up in George Bernard Shaw's comment on one such, in a piece in the Saturday Review in 1885: 'Expensively mounted and superlatively dull.' Actor-managers like Charles Kean painstakingly created Messina's harbour for the opening scene, with its grand houses and lapping waters illuminated by the rising moon. Artistic change began through the adventurous work of director/designers such as Ellen Terry's own son, Edward Gordon Craig. In 1903, in partnership with his mother, (again playing Beatrice), he produced Much Ado on a simple and impressionistic set, using lighting, curtains and painted pillars to evoke the various settings and moods of the play. William Poel was another revolutionary artistic spirit, leading the Elizabethan Stage Society in their production of Much Ado in 1904. Their aim was to return to the bare thrust stage and fluid pace of the Elizabethan playhouse.
The play maintained its popularity throughout the twentieth century, enjoying an especially exuberant production at the National Theatre in 1965 under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli, in an overtly Sicilian, late- nineteenth-century setting. Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens brought their impeccable comic timing and unmistakable sexual chemistry to the roles of Beatrice and Benedick in a Messina lorded over by Albert Finney's charismatic, cigar-smoking Mafioso Don Pedro.
Kenneth Branagh played Benedick in his Renaissance Theatre Company's production at the Birmingham Repertory theatre in 1988, directed by Judi Dench. He played the role again in his film version of the play in 1993, this time with Emma Thompson as his Beatrice. This was a visually delightful version of the play, set in a beautiful Tuscan landscape at some imprecise point at the turn of the nineteenth century. The casting and costumes were equally handsome and the play's darker elements overshadowed by sunny comedy and high spirits.
