Don John - "Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"

The insidious Don John brings up one of the most important and often-asked questions in sociology: is it nature or nurture that most affects people's personalities? Shakespeare seems to answer this question himself by creating numerous characters who are at once bastards and villains, but to me this seems more a convention of the day than an opinion of Shakespeare himself. In Medieval Europe, sex out of wedlock was a sin, the product of which would be a bastard, who, being tainted at birth by this sinful behavior, would no doubt lead a life of misfortune. This, of course, is a ridiculous notion; it's not the sin that makes the poor bastards miserable, it's being treated as somehow less of a human being that creates such depressed and often villainous characters. Don John himself claims, "...it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love of any..." (1.3.18-19) The sentiment Shakespeare seems to put forth here is that a bastard's fate is to accept the world's contempt and to keep oneself out of society, so as not to "rob" anyone of their happiness. This alone might seem like an ample enough reason to resent society and desire to withdraw from it, but the mistreatment of illegitimate children in Shakespeare's time went beyond just stigma. As if to make certain their prophecy of the extramarital sin begetting sorrow in the offspring's life, bastards were not allowed any inheritance from their fathers. Indeed, the Latin phrase "filius nullius", which was their term for bastard, literally means "child of nobody", but, more importantly, "heir of nobody", creating  the stigma under which character's like Don John suffered. And a damning stigma it was; as British MP Joseph King wrote in his 1910 pamphlet Filius Nullius: Nobody's Child, the plight of illegitimate children was "a cruel injustice... silently borne, and... bitterly resented by the sufferers." It is clear to me that had Don John been raised more like his half-brother, Don Pedro, as a legitimate child with the promise of inheritance and common human dignity, he would not be the cold, calculating villain of Much Ado About Nothing.

Works Cited

King, Joseph. "Filius Nullius: Nobody's Child." Peasant Arts - Haslemere. 1 September 2012. Web. 5 December 2012. <http://peasant-arts.blogspot.com/2012/09/filius-nullius-nobodys-child-by-joseph.html>

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. Ed. Jonathan Bate. William Shakespeare Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. 1st ed. Modern Library, 2007. 264. Print.