Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

Dominant Ne: Beatrice is incredibly talkative, and very witty. She pulls her humour from reality and branches off of into all manner of new ideas, often beating Benedick in her verbal battles with him. Much of her humour also consists of elaborate buns and connections that are surprising to others, but that come naturally to Beatrice. Underneath this, Beatrice is a deep character. She wants to find meaning in everything and doesn’t settle for just any man –she wants the perfect man. Beatrice sees the emotional connections between others, and gets extremely distracted from pretty much everything by the idea that Benedick is in love with her. Beatrice sees the paradoxes and oddities of the world, but rather than allowing those things to get her down, she chooses to laugh heartily at them.

Auxiliary Fi: Beatrice is aware of her emotions enough to recognize that she’s fallen in love, but denies it because she’s afraid to be vulnerable. She acts purely based on her own personal ethical sense and doesn’t care what other people think of her choices. She rebells against societal values to a certain extent, especially gender inequality when Hero is mistreated. “O that I were a man for his sake! Or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake!” Beatrice often tries to deny her feelings towards Benedict even after admitting to them, and in all honesty, cares more about herself than she does about him. She’s the one who’s most in control in the relationship, starting when she refuses to pursue him unless he agrees to help fix Hero’s reputation. Beatrice doesn’t talk about her feelings to anyone, but tends to reason them out within herself.

Tertiary Te: Beatrice likes to interrupt other people’s conversations and tends to speak her mind without a care for how it makes her appear to others. In fact, her first line in the play is her interrupting a conversation. Her words are always filled with sarcasm and her Te comments are where the bitterness of her emotions bleeds through. She’s witty and clever with her words and she displays marked intelligence –which is always increased when she’s ridiculing Benedick.

Inferior Si: Beatrice has been hurt before, and it is likely that she and Benedick were in a prior relationship before the play. Every time she sees Benedick, she is reminded of the hurtful feelings that arose in prior times, and so she does everything she can to insult him. Much of the humour she plays on Benedick is actually hurtful, because she always plays off of truths from the past, rather than making things up.