Peggy Ashcroft Holt in "Edward, My Son", in the West End and then on Broadway, and the downtrodden Catherine Sloper in "The Heiress" in 1949. Ashcroft began the 1950s with a return to Shakespeare, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Beatrice to Gielgud's Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Cordelia to his King Lear. In 1951 she returned to the Old Vic, playing Viola in "Twelfth Night", the title role in "Electra" and Mistress Page in "The Merry Wives of Windsor". In the second of these, according to Billington, "she scaled the austere peaks of Greek tragedy". Through the rest
Much Ado About Nothing and proneness to sexual lightness". In the patriarchal society of the play, the men's loyalties were governed by conventional codes of honour and camaraderie and a sense of superiority to women. Assumptions that women are by nature prone to inconstancy are shown in the repeated jokes on cuckoldry and partly explain Claudio's readiness to believe the slur against Hero. This stereotype is turned on its head in Balthazar's song "Sigh No More," which presents men as the deceitful and inconstant sex that women must suffer. A theme in Shakespeare is cuckoldry or the infidelity of a wife. Several of the