Dogberry

For the fruit, see dogberries.

Dogberry is a self-satisfied night constable in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing.

In the play, Dogberry is the chief of the citizen-police in Messina. As is usual in Shakespearean comedy, and Renaissance comedy generally, he is a figure of comic incompetence. The humor of Dogberry's character is his frequent use of malapropism, a technique Shakespeare would use again in Measure for Measure's Elbow. In both plays, Shakespeare appears to be poking mild fun at the amateur police forces of his day, in which respectable citizens spent a fixed number of nights per year fulfilling an obligation to protect the public peace, a job for which they were, by and large, unqualified.

Dogberry and his crew, however, are also given a thematic function, for it is they who (accidentally) uncover the plot of Don John and begin the process of restoration that leads to the play's happy conclusion. In that sense, Dogberry's comic ineptitude is made to serve the sense of a providential force overseeing the fortunate restoration of social and emotional order.

When describing a criminal's offense, Dogberry likes to say it in many different ways as a numbered list out of order: "Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves." When insulted or derided, he is very malicious about making sure it gets recorded by the Sexton, and when he is called an "ass" after the Sexton leaves, he is so proud of his new title that he becomes extremely boastful, to comic effect:

O that he were here to write me

down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass...O that

I had been writ down an ass!

He was played by Michael Keaton in the 1993 film adaptation, and has also been played on television by Michael Elphick, Frank Finlay, and Barnard Hughes respectively (this last production was first staged as part of the Joseph Papp Shakespeare Festival series). In Terry Hands' 1982 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Christopher Benjamin alternated in the role with Terry Woods.

In the film adaptation from East Hollywood High School, he was portrayed by Dakota Nelson. The film was adapted into a teen comedy, along the same lines of Napoleon Dynamite, Better Off Dead, and Old School (film), so it was only natural for the character to be adapted into the school's hall moniter. Nelson describes him as being a "militaristic nerd". In the film, it is implied that Dogberry dreams of growing up to become a drill sargent based upon what he is wearing; a trenchcoat with dozens of military badges badly sewn to it, and a fake, turbin-like bandage aroung his head.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wood, James, ed. (1907). The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)