i.16-17) the line however clearly describes the general behavior of the characters in the play, that "dare do" all kinds of things that provoke fate, without knowing what they do. Don Pedro's wooing of Hero to help Claudio is also significant, as Claudio does not actually needs his help so the offering is superfluous.
Even Friar Francis who pretends Hero is dead endangers the happiness of the two, in spite of his good intentions. If we remember Romeo and Juliet's story we can deduce the kind of consequences that his deception might have had: "Your daughter here the princes left for dead. / Let her awhile be secretly kept in,/and publish it that she is dead indeed. / Maintain a mourning ostentation / and on your family's old monument / Hang mournful epitaphs, and do all rites/That appertain unto a burial."(IV.i.204-10.)
Berenice and Benedick's love affair is even stranger, as they continually aim at each other with all kinds of injurious declarations, also running the peril of inducing serious consequences. Also, their story seems to have been silenced somehow by Shakespeare, and to have had a previous darker part. Their apparent hatred for each other seems very serious: "Not till God make men of some other metal than / earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be / overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? To make / an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? / No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren;/and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred. (II.i.52-57) the allusions to Hercules as Dobransky points out are very significant as the mythological hero had actually done a terrible act of jealously and killed his sons (Dobransky, 237):
She told me, not thinking I had been / myself, that I was the prince's jester, that I was / duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest / with such impossible conveyance upon me that I stood / like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at / me. She speaks poniards, and every word stabs: / if her breath were as terrible...
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