Shakespeare’s romantic comedies may seem an unusual place to find one of the original bad (bad, bad) cops, but Much Ado About Nothing is home to Constable Dogberry, head of the Watch, a man who’s out to prove “I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer,” and he’s all out of wise fellow. Michael Keaton’s Dogberry growlingly enters the subplot surrounding Lady Hero’s unlawfully besmirched honor, and conducts an interrogation so gloriously incompetent and so peppered with hurt feelings—how many times is even possible to note that a man’s an ass?—that the bad guys end up confessing all to Denzel Washington’s Don Pedro just to get out of Dogberry’s custody. Shakespeare’s derisive caricature of the self-important and oblivious constable critiques the changing structures of law enforcement in the Elizabethan era, and while the trappings have changed, many a modern incompetent cop is a direct descendent of this particularly trying lawman. In fact, Nathan Fillion recently gave the role a try in of the tale.
