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Regular visitors to this project will know by now that I take an almost intentionally awkward approach to these prompts.

I avoid the obvious and the cliché.

Then I set out my terms for a response, based on what I call my ‘personal baggage’. That includes lived experience, certainly, but also something as simple as the mood I happen to be in on a particular day.

The truth is that this time next year, I might respond to the same prompt completely differently. This is what readers, and literature students, do.

Either way, I’m always practising what I preach to students week in, week out.

If you say what everyone else is saying, you’ll probably get the same mark everyone else is getting. If you have something of your own to say, and you can support it, an examiner is listening.

Ahem – “Think Freely. Then Earn It.”

So why Beatrice?

Why not Lady Macbeth? Too obvious.

Or Goneril and Regan? Formidable, certainly, but hardly fantastic.

Or Queen Margaret, who may well be both, but suffers from my determination not to turn Shakespeare Sunday into ‘Richard III Weekly’.

Though if anyone feels strongly enough to champion another Shakespearean woman, I’d genuinely love to chat about it.

If you want a character who is both formidable and fantastic, I think you need to look to the comedies.

These aren’t simply strong women who will dash you to pieces if you hurl yourself against them. They are women to fall in love with: intelligent, passionate, moral, witty and loyal.

Perhaps it is this last quality that separates Beatrice from Rosalind in ‘As You Like It’, another personal favourite.

People usually remember Beatrice’s sharp tongue.

The barbed wit. The jokes and innuendo. The verbal sparring with the hapless Benedick. Certainly, she is a woman who likes the last word.

But Shakespeare makes her three-dimensional. He gives her another side.

Hero is often overshadowed by Beatrice. Less outspoken, less memorable on first acquaintance, she can seem almost slight beside her cousin’s force of personality. Yet she remains a human being. So when she is publicly shamed, abandoned, and humiliated at the altar, while others hesitate, doubt, or search for explanations, Beatrice recognises the injustice immediately.

Her response is not cleverness but loyalty.

“I would eat his heart in the market-place.”

It is a startling line because love prompts it, not cruelty. Beatrice is not interested in violence for its own sake; she is enraged by the suffering of someone she cares about.

And she is wounded by the frustration of being unable to answer that harm in the way a man might.

For all her intelligence, independence and other remarkable qualities, perhaps her most admirable is her refusal to abandon Hero when even Hero’s own father turns against her.

That, to my mind, is what makes Beatrice both formidable and fantastic.

Not the sharpness of her tongue, but the fierceness of her loyalty.

References

[a] ‘Perfect Day’, Lou Reed, Loaded (1970)

[b] Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. by Claire McEachern, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

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