Benedick’s realization of this cost is sharp but not unprecedented in the play. That romance and marriage signal an end to certain sorts of male relationship is part of the wistfulness of Much Ado. Military camaraderie outside the play is replaced within it by the ‘merry war’ (1.1.59) of words between Beatrice and Benedick, and violent plots and ambushes are recast in the play’s repeated tropes of overhearing. In ‘The Last One’ (2004), the final episode of the long-running romantic sitcom Friends, the establishment of the heterosexual couples which will bring narrative closure is
...more