Love Conquers All

“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet” – Plato

Benedick and Beatrice in love

My favorite dialogue scene in Much Ado About Nothing is the scene where Benedick rehearses a love poem he wrote for Beatrice. The poem goes,

“The god of love, that sits above, and knows me, and knows me, how pitiful I deserve, — I mean in singing; but in loving, Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole bookful of these quondam carpet-mangers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse, why, they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love. Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried: I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby,’ an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn,’ ‘horn,’ a hard rhyme; for, ‘school,’ ‘fool,’ a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings: no, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.”

I admire this particular scene because it shows how love can trump any other feeling. Benedick’s initial animosity and scorn towards Beatrice completely disappears in this scene. After realizing that she loves him, Benedick’s entire language and demeanor changes from sardonic to wittily romantic, showing how love is a very powerful emotion. To leave off with some advice, as Nelson Rockefeller once said, “Never forget that the most powerful force on earth is love.”