I have mixed feelings about this play. In the first part of the play the characters seemed fairly superficial. They were characteristically quick to fall in love, their emotions didn't seem very realistic to me, and there was very little depth to any of them, which made it a little hard for me to relate to any of them. But in the second part Shakespeare began to give a glimmer of dimension to the characters, especially to Leonato and Beatrice. Shakespeare seems to have tapped into the rawness of "negative" human emotions in the second half of the play, and his portrayal of this in his characters served to make them more realistic and dimensional. Sadly, Hero and Claudio never really became much to write home about, which is a shame since they really were the characters upon which the play was centered. Had the range of emotions that Hero and Claudio surely would have been experiencing been better crafted, and if the depth of the characters could have been well drawn from beginning to end, I think this play could have certainly outdone Romeo and Juliet in terms of commenting upon the havoc that love can wreak upon the human soul.
