Dogberry - "To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune."

Dogberry is, in many ways, the antithesis of Don Pedro. Where Don Pedro has a mastery of persuasion and language, Dogberry struggles to string together coherent, let alone elegant, sentences, and comes across as rather slimy, as opposed to the dashing personality of the prince. But Dogberry is also Don Pedro's opposite in terms of class. One might argue that Dogberry has made something of his low - or at least common - status by becoming head of the watch, but Shakespeare purposefully writes him as inept and bumbling as a representation of the citizen-police of his day. In some ways, Shakespeare could certainly be accused of perpetuating the very stereotypes and prejudices that his characters, sometimes comically, portray. Dogberry is perhaps the only character truly aware of the class system in place; where others follow unwritten laws of tradition (honor, loyalty, fealty) without so much as a thought, Dogberry must constantly and consciously try to behave in a manner befitting a higher class. As David W. Cole writes in The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare, "(Dogberry) is aggressively aware of his social status, but everything he says and does to assert his material and intellectual advantages advertises instead his limits to his betters, if not to his peers." One way in which Dogberry is like to Don Pedro is that he achieves his goals in questionable ways, but the outcome is positive. Dogberry and his inept watchmen had no intention of arresting anyone that night, let alone the conspirators Borachio and Conrade. Dogberry tells his men that if a man does not stand in the Prince's name, they shall "...take no note of him, but let him go, and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of the knave." (3.3.19-20) And yet the watchmen capture the plotters and Dogberry is able to foil Don John's dastardly scheme, ending up with a happy result much in the way of the manipulative Don Pedro.

Works Cited

Cole, W. David. The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Joseph Rosenblum. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. 487. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. Ed. Jonathan Bate. William Shakespeare Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. 1st ed. Modern Library, 2007. 280. Print.