How does Benedick and Beatrice's behaviour challenge gender roles? Does the answer change according to whether we are thinking about Shakespeare's...

Beatrice's behaviour challenges gender roles, particularly for a Jacobean audience, from the very start of the play. Her outspokenness and witty banter with the messenger in 1.1 is contrasted with Hero's quiet submissiveness in this male world. At the start of 2.1, Leonato warns Beatrice that she will not get herself a husband if she 'is so shrewish [of her] tongue.'

Benedick challenges gender roles must less obviously in the first half of the play. He sees himself as attractive to women, but is resolutely a bachelor, a soldier and a 'lad'. He changes, though, as he's tricked into discovering his love for Beatrice. In the failed wedding scene, 4.1, he and the Friar are alone among the men in not condemning Hero. Hero is subjected to a torrent of misogynistic abuse, by Claudio, Don Pedro and, horrifyingly, by her own father. Benedick builds on the friar's suggestion that there is 'some misprision in the princes', and looks to Don John as its author.

Later, alone with Beatrice, Benedick must confront the stark choice that she has presented him: if he loves her, he must 'kill Claudio'. She in turn has railed against gender roles, wishing herself a man, that she might 'eat his heart in the market-place.' Initially, Benedick is horrified, but on hearing Beatrice confirm that she thinks 'in her soul that Count Claudio has wronged Hero', he accepts the truth of her instinctive, unshakeable and feminine faith in Hero and goes to challenge him.