Shakespeare · Lewkenor · Beatrice and the returning soldier
Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice, the Soldier and the Reputation of Words
BENEDICK: Suffer love! a good epithet! I do suffer love
indeed, for I love thee against my will.BEATRICE: In spite of your heart, I think; alas, poor heart!
If you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for
yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates.BENEDICK: Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, V.ii.
A soldier’s marriage to Beatrice, a comedy of overheard words, and the distance between public honour and private feeling.
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Lewes Lewkenor married a woman named Beatrice during his years in the Low Countries. She shared the unsettled life of a soldier abroad, came with him to England, and appears with him in records of travel, property and children. In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice confronts another returning soldier: Benedick, whose wit protects him from admitting how much her opinion matters.
The shared name makes an arresting beginning. The more substantial comparison lies in the society around it: soldiers returning from service, reputations enlarged by report, foreign households, divided loyalties, and the danger of accepting a persuasive story as truth. Lewkenor writes about these things from experience. Shakespeare makes them the machinery of a comedy in which words can bring lovers together or almost destroy a woman.
Beatrice de Rota: a household across the Channel
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Beatrice de Rota belonged to the Low Countries. Her marriage to Lewkenor preceded his return to England, and their children included William and Thomas. The family survived the financial difficulties and physical injuries of his continental service. A later grant of the Selsey property names husband, wife and son together:
To Lewis Lewknor, his wife Beatrice, and his son William, for their lives, of the grange of Selsey Isle, Sussex; rent, 20l. 6s. 8d.
Grant of the Selsey grange, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth I; extract from the calendared description.
In June 1600, the official record follows Beatrice back towards the Channel. The passport identifies her through both her own name and Lewkenor’s royal employment:
An open warrant with general direction to all her Majesty’s public officers requiring them to suffer Beatrice de Rota, wife of Lewis Lewkenor, her Majesty’s servant, to pass unto the seaside with her child, a maid, and two men, and to suffer her to embark at any port where she shall think good for her journey.
Warrant for Beatrice de Rota’s passage, June 1600; spelling modernised.
These are traces of an actual marriage, with dependants, servants, property and journeys. They give Beatrice an existence beyond the coincidence of her name with the dramatic heroine. The records do not describe her conversation or temperament; the wit of Shakespeare’s Beatrice belongs to the play.
“A kind of merry war”
LEONATO: You must not, sir, mistake my niece. There is a
kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her:
they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.
The comedy begins with news of a campaign. Claudio’s reputation arrives in advance of him, carried by a messenger who praises his courage. Beatrice immediately subjects the language of military honour to a different examination:
BEATRICE: I pray you, how many hath he
killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath
he killed? for indeed I promised to eat all of his killing.MESSENGER: He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.
BEATRICE: You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it:
he is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an
excellent stomach.
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.
“Valiant” survives, but its meaning changes from courage in battle to appetite at table. The messenger tries to restore Benedick’s dignity; Beatrice keeps control of the account. Her jokes make military reputation something to be tested rather than received reverently.
Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives performs a more severe examination of the promises attached to service abroad. He addresses a prospective recruit who imagines advancement, wealth and freedom, and offers the experience those expectations leave out:
And I shall take great joy and comfort, if myself having undertaken an untowardly and dangerous course, though with better success than hath happened to many hundreds, may be as a caveat to all the young gentlemen of our nation, how they hazard themselves so dangerously; and that my painful experience may be to them as a looking glass, wherein they may behold the spots and errors of their conceived fancies, or as a mark set up for them, whereby they may avoid the perils and most dangerous rocks and shelves, to them yet unknown, and lying hidden under the smooth, fair, and delightful conceived and fantasied pleasures, suggested unto them by their own imagination, the same being unexperienced, and therefore without mistrust.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), opening address; spelling modernised.
The comparison concerns the authority of experience. A soldier’s public description of himself may omit hunger, unpaid wages and disappointment. In the comedy, Beatrice refuses to let the returning men monopolise the story of their own excellence.
“Two pretty jests”: soldiers making an appearance
Lewkenor also knew soldiers as comic performers. In Brussels in 1590, he records a Spaniard who found a way to recover money owed to him. The soldier adopted a friar’s habit and enlisted the guardian’s help in pleading with the treasurer:
But here by the way I think it not amiss to tell you two pretty jests that happened at Brussels whiles I was there, in the year of our Lord 1590, the one of a Spanish, and the other of a Sicilian soldier, either of which practised his wit upon John de Lasture the King’s treasurer, to the obtaining of a little money, for the which they had a long time followed in vain. The Spaniard getteth him to the guardian of the Gray Friars in Brussels, professing with a marvellous contrition and remorse of conscience, an exceeding zeal and inclination to enter into religion, praying him in Christian charity not to refuse to receive him, seeing it had now pleased God to touch his heart with so godly and zealous a desire; in fine, he used such persuasive speeches that the guardian was contented presently to admit him, and withal, to allow him a time of probation.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), Brussels anecdotes; spelling modernised.
The conversion lasts just long enough to secure payment. Gesture, dress and an apparently burdened conscience persuade an audience to accept the soldier’s performance. The story is not a source for the plot of Much Ado, but it shows Lewkenor attending closely to the theatrical ingenuity of soldiers outside battle.
In Shakespeare’s comedy, friends manipulate appearances for a kinder purpose. Benedick overhears an arranged conversation about Beatrice’s love; Beatrice is drawn into a corresponding scene. Each believes the evidence precisely because it appears not to have been intended for their ears. Their resistance to love gives way before a performance they mistake for private truth.
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Hero: the ruin of a reputation
The deception surrounding Hero exposes the same susceptibility to report with devastating consequences. Don John’s plot succeeds because Claudio and Don Pedro believe they have seen confirmation of a story they were already prepared to hear. At the wedding, Claudio treats the accusation as an established fact:
CLAUDIO: There, Leonato, take her back again:
Give not this rotten orange to your friend;
She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, IV.i.
Claudio reads Hero’s blush as evidence against her. The audience knows that the interpretation is false. The man who congratulates himself on seeing through a disguise has been deceived by one.
The Hero story belongs to a European narrative tradition. Bandello’s tale of Timbreo and Fenicia, published in 1554 and set in Messina, is an important precedent; Ariosto’s Ariodante and Ginevra story supplies another version of the slandered woman. Harington’s English Orlando Furioso appeared in 1591. Shakespeare brings that inherited material into contact with the independent energies of Beatrice and Benedick. The two courtships test one another: Claudio’s readiness to condemn Hero gives Beatrice a reason to demand something more than a declaration of love.
BENEDICK: Come, bid me do any thing for thee.
BEATRICE: Kill Claudio.
BENEDICK: Ha! not for the wide world.
BEATRICE: You kill me to deny it. Farewell.
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, IV.i.
The abruptness breaks the rhythm of courtship. Beatrice asks Benedick to challenge the solidarity of the soldiers and stand beside a woman whose reputation they have destroyed. Her command forces his new commitment to become an action with consequences.
Lewkenor to Kyrton: “My dearest wife”
Lewkenor’s own voice survives in the letter he sent to Robert Kyrton after Beatrice’s death. Grief interrupts the business of securing a place for a young man in a lord’s travelling household. Lewkenor explains his delay, recalls the promises already made, and asks that the place should not be lost. The letter moves between the bedside, the household and the practical obligations that remain:
Good Mr Kyrton,
I have endured many sharp strokes of affliction since I saw you last, never since that time in manner stirring from the bedside of my dearest wife, who, having long languished in the great extremity of utmost painful sickness, is now [called to God?] this last Monday, released from the woeful sadness of this false world and assumed into the blessed society of his holy angels.
This hath been the cause that I have not as yet, being wholly overwhelmed [uncertain words], presented my form [reading uncertain] unto my most honourable good Lord. But, good Mr Kyrton, I do rely upon my Lord’s promise and yours that he may go over attending upon my Lord in that sort that may be most to do my Lord service and to himself of least expense. I will send him over in sort as shall be fitting, and he hath friends of quality both there that will be very kindly thankful for any favour you shall show him.
I earnestly entreat you that he may not fail to be accepted into my Lordship’s train, although the same, as I fear me, be in this meanwhile completely full. You shall forever engage me in an infinite beholdingness unto you, and so, assuring myself of your love and favour herein, I rest yours very faithfully assured,
Lewes Lewkenor
From my sorrowful house in Red Church Street.
This 13th March 1604.
Lewkenor to Robert Kyrton, 13 March 1604/5 (13 March 1605 in modern year numbering), in The Letters of Lewes Lewkenor, compiled 18 August 2026. Full text as supplied in the collection, with spelling and punctuation modernised. Brackets preserve uncertain or incomplete readings in the supplied transcription; the original image has not been collated.
The appeal continues beyond the bereavement. Even while describing himself as overwhelmed, Lewkenor promises to equip the traveller properly and presses Kyrton to honour an earlier commitment. He worries that the train may already be full, and makes personal gratitude part of his request. The surviving wording does not securely identify the young man or the lord.
The letter belongs to the years after the comedy’s first publication. It gives the historical Beatrice’s marriage an emotional depth that the property records cannot supply. “My dearest wife” and “my sorrowful house” bring the public servant into view as a husband whose life has been suspended by illness and loss.
It also changes the balance of the comparison. The name Beatrice first draws attention to a lively courtship. Lewkenor’s letter makes us attend to the life after courtship: fidelity in illness, the care of a household and the sorrow of separation.
“I was born to speak all mirth”
BEATRICE: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there
was a star danced, and under that was I born.
Cousins, God give you joy!LEONATO: Niece, will you look to those things I told you of?
BEATRICE: I cry you mercy, uncle. By your grace’s pardon.
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, II.i.
Beatrice’s wit is a form of independence, but it does not prevent her from attending to other people’s happiness. Her loyalty to Hero gives the comedy its moral pressure. Benedick becomes worthy of her when he can act on that loyalty rather than merely answer her jokes.
By the end, neither lover has entirely surrendered the protective language of mockery. Their love poems disclose what their conversation keeps trying to disguise. The “merry war” survives, but its meaning has altered: wit can now acknowledge affection as well as ward it off.
Books, records and further reading
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, complete text; first published in quarto in 1600. Royal Shakespeare Company, dates and sources, for the play’s Italian narrative precedents. Folger Shakespeare Library, introduction to the play.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); the Selsey grant and Beatrice’s June 1600 travel warrant; Lewkenor to Robert Kyrton, 13 March 1604/5. Prose extracts have modernised spelling. The Kyrton letter is reproduced in full from The Letters of Lewes Lewkenor (18 August 2026), retaining its uncertain readings in brackets.