Hero with an attitude

Shakespeare’s Claudio and Hero are usually played as palely conventional lovers, a foil to the sparkling sparring of Benedick and Beatrice. A recent British National Theatre production of Much Ado gives a more colorful Claudio and Hero. According to the TLS reviewer, Laurie Maguire, “Claudio (Daniel Hawkesford) is alarmed by Don Pedro’s suggestion of proxy wooing, acquiescing only because a count cannot contradict a prince. Hero (Susannah Fielding), already in love with Claudio, is manifestly unhappy at her father’s instructions that she entertain the prince’s overtures of love. Her clenched-teeth compliance is expressed in the masked ball where her witty rebuffs to the prince (‘I am yours for the walk – and especially when I walk away’) are not modestly flirtatious teases so much as barbs from an embryonic Beatrice.”

This Hero is not apt to accept Claudio at the second wedding, so the director sets her to eavesdrop on Claudio’s contrition before Hero’s putative tomb: “She witnesses a sackclothed Claudio read the epitaph for his dead (as he thinks) bride and prostrate himself on her grave, whereupon she gives her father and the friar permission to proceed with Shakespeare’s plot.”

Such a treatment of Hero certainly opens up dramatic possibilities, and thematic possibilities as well.