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in 1662. Such apparently mismatched, wrangling pairs have remained a staple, from 18th-century drawing-room comedy (and its novelistic descendants, B?atrice et B?n?dict

Some Victorian actor-manager, such as Charles Kean, Charles Calvert, like their clean laundry hanging in the public by submitting their own wives as Beatrice. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, but a compelling and intimate stage vicious pair in 1882 to keep rates gossip to this day, if they ever were lovers behind the scenes. Nobody in the know probably suspected such a link between Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, no matter how often they Beatrice and Benedick played (1931, 1950, 1955), but the stage chemistry between his contemptuous Benedick and her mischievous, tactless, unpredictable primary and passionate Beatrice was undeniable.

The most popular and most admired Benedick in living memory, Sir Donald Sinden likely, compared with an alternately serious and vulnerable Judi Dench in John Barton 's been cast RSC production of 1976. His Benedick was on the verge of middle age: no one witty, dashing Mercutio Romeo duped into ever but someone in imminent danger of turning into self-satisfied, bore wit-repetition of the officers 'mess. Sinden 's long experience in light comedy that gave him confidence in his virtuoso playing unpredictably vary from night to night, recklessly willing to play any differently than audiences may be a stand-up comedian.

Remind the audience about how he sometimes carried out his entire monologue at the end of the second act - in which Benedick into believing that Beatrice tricked loves him, gradually abandon its former opposition, the marriage - as if remonstrated with increasing vehemence, with a single selected audience in the stalls. It would be an enormous emphatically nodding height of the line "The world must be peopled \ be", as if this is a clinching retaliation to convince with his stubborn opponent of it, and then stomp out triumphantly - just for a moment calmed later clearly be , the same audience changes with a conciliatory offer to save face, "When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I would live till I were married". Dench, remembers looking for are so funny and so continuously that, unexpectedly, sometimes they laugh too much to their subsequent performance.

Barton, rare among today's directors of Much Ado

But the real trouble with the customary view that