My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
I sometimes forget how very very strange Much Ado About Nothing is. Beatrice and Benedick are the scene stealers, their witty sometimes biting back and forth – covering up their longing for one another – they are living examples of “you both protest too much” … they are so dazzling, their chemistry sparking off the page over 400 years later… in other words, they are the only game in town. When you think Much Ado About Nothing, you think of them.
But … Beatrice and Benedick are not the leads. They’re always AROUND, but the play is an ensemble piece, and the main plot-line belongs to Claudio and Hero, a brief nearly silent romance which goes south at the altar, due to the lying scheming brother of the Prince (like, what is your DEAL, bro), who spread rumors about Hero, set up Claudio to doubt her chastity. The treachery is real, the betrayal catastrophic, seemingly insurmountable. The solution to the conundrum is suggested by the priest – one of the only truly helpful priests in Shakespeare’s entire canon. His priests usually veer from incompetent to downright corrupt and/or evil. So the priest comes up with a WILD plan. He wants to fake Hero’s death, launch a whirlwind of community mourning, led by Claudio, the now penitent man who was the cause of her disgrace. But then, the cherry on top: we will PRETEND that the still-alive Hero, in hiding due to the shame, is her own cousin, who looks exactly like her (just like Maddie in Twin Peaks). To “make up” for his awfulness, Claudio will marry this cousin, sight unseen. I guess as long as they look exactly alike then what’s the difference?
Like, this is a LOT and it takes up most of the air-space in the script. Beatrice and Benedick are onlookers to the unfolding tragedy, they get roped into it due to their care for Hero and Claudio, and they seem – frankly – like the only grown-ups onstage. They are not ingenues. They are seasoned. They’ve clearly already had a relationship. There is a treacherous maid, the treacherous brother and his two “knaves” who skulk around the manor making mischief – for no discernible reason. To round things out, there’s a group of “watchmen”, tasked with policing the grounds. They are led by Dogberry, puffed up with his own ego, but struggling mightily with language. He insists on using this lofty tone, and yet he doesn’t have the vocabulary. It’s malaprop after malaprop. You can tell what he means, in every instance, but he’s reaching towards something that isn’t there. When he arrests Borachio and Conrade he says, “Masters, never speak, we charge you, let us obey you to go with us.” What he MEANS to say is “…Please obey, and come with us.” “Let us obey you to go with us.” hahaha
There is so much eavesdropping in this play! People barely have enough time to plan for the wedding, they are so busy staging conversations for the person they know is listening. There’s a masked ball, where no one knows who anyone is. Lots of dirt is dished. The entire family decides to join forces to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love and … honestly, they don’t have to work that hard. Their love for each other is obvious from the start. They just needed the nudge, the sign that the coast was clear.
The revelation of their love comes just before the devastating wedding and Claudio’s horrible behavior. This leads to one of the most shocking moments in any Shakespeare play. Beatrice and Benedick have melted together, they still banter but they are now soft and open, admitting their feelings. Benedick pleads with her, “Come, tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” Whatever he might have hoped she’d say, whatever we in the audience might expect her to say – something soft and loving – she says, “Kill Claudio.”
I’ve seen this play many times and there are shocked gasps from the audience. And she MEANS it. She basically breaks up with him immediately when he hesitates. They’ve barely gotten together and she’s telling him to murder someone!
The play is called a comedy but … the overall sensation is uneasiness. There’s real terror and grief and horrific behavior. Honor has to die and then pretend to be her own cousin to find happiness. You don’t get stuff like this in Midsummer or As You Like It. Joy is threatened here, the happy ending is conditional, you find your love but there are still really bad actors out there. Claudio’s behavior is reprehensible, even more so since he seemed so nice and tender. (He is the Nice GuyTM. Look out for them. They’ll slut-shame you at the earliest opportunity.) Don John is a sociopath emissary from another play, and somehow he seems worse than Iago, although Iago is bad enough! But Othello is a mighty tragedy, and there Iago makes sense, even with his – as Coleridge calls it – “motiveless malignity.” Don John is sinister. What the hell is he doing in a romantic comedy?
The strangeness of tone is fascinating, especially since his next comedy is not only one of his best but one of the best comedies ever. Here, tragedy looms. In As You Like It, there’s pure joy coming out of overwhelming longing – longing that is sweet. Most noticeable, though, is As You Like It‘s prioritization of play above all else. Rosalind practices wooing with Orlando. She trains him through role play. It’s a game. Much Ado also features play, with all the mini “scenes” of people having audacious phony conversations so the person hiding in the corner can hear. This, too, is play. In As You Like It, though, play totally takes over. Play’s the thing. Don John would be laughed out of the forest.
Having gone through the sonnets, and drinking up Stephen Booth’s unbelievable footnotes, some of which stretch for ten pages, I have some thoughts on the title. At first glance, the title seems like a throw-away. Much Ado About Nothing means … you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill, you’re getting all worked up over nothing, calm down it’s not that deep, etc. Maybe this would fit for Merry Wives where the stakes are nearly nonexistent but here? The title doesn’t fit at ALL if you take it at surface level! There’s so much at stake in Much Ado. “Nothing” is a big word to Shakespeare, though. “Nothing” is everywhere. Cordelia’s “nothing” in King Lear is the most famous “nothing” in Shakespeare’s body of work. You can’t say her “nothing” means “no big deal”. Nothing is not a dead end, it’s endlessness. Booth’s breakdown of the multiple layers of associations with “nothing” was a permanent perspective-change. Once you know about the nothing thing, you see nothing everywhere. You grasp/grok the deeper meanings. And here it’s in the title! Pay attention!
“Nothing” has multiple layers of meaning. In one way you can think about it like “nothing” can also mean “everything”, like the infinity inside of a circle. Nothing is a starting point: anything can happen if you start with “nothing”. But – of course – there’s a sexual slang connotation. “Thing” was slang for penis and therefore if you have “no thing” then you see where we’re going. Gives Much Ado About Nothing a very different connotation than “Much Ado About Fluff”. So the “no thing” and “everything” comes straight from Stephen Booth, and one of the main topics of conversation and controversy in Much Ado is Hero’s virginity. She literally has to fake her own death in order to avoid the shame, which she shouldn’t even feel ANYway because she is guilty of nothing. (Nothing). And so here: Vaginas are a BIG deal even though the slang term describes what they are NOT. (Kinda like the Latin root of “pudendum” being “shame”. Misogyny baked into the language. If the Latin root for “penis” was also “shame” maybe it would be a different story, but no, the root for “penis” is “tail”, descriptive – sort of – of what it is as a body part. There’s no judgment attached to it.) In my research, I learned another potential meaning from Marjorie Garber. “Nothing” in Elizabethan English was pronounced “noting” – at least this is what people who know things believe – and Much Ado About Nothing or “Noting” – is FILLED with the word “note” (as well as “nothing”). Taking notes: Much Ado closes with the reveal of a torn-up sonnet, and earlier we watch Benedick struggling to write said sonnet. “Taking note of” means “paying attention” and/or “noticing”, and in this play where everyone keeps a close eye on everyone else “noting” is more than relevant. “Noting” is all anyone does in Much Ado. Take note (see how I did that?) of how many times the words “nothing” “none” “note” “noting” and, hell, “nobody” or even “no” show up in the play. I started a tally and finally gave up because it was tedious (“Neighbors, you are tedious”) and neverending. Suffice to say: examples on nearly on every page.
While Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version is so good, I also love Joss Whedon’s version from 2013, starring Amy Acker, Alexis Denisoff, Nathan Fillion (as the aforementioned Dogberry: hilarious), and many other people from Whedon’s repertory. Apparently Whedon hosts gatherings where all his actor friends come over for a night of Shakespeare. Their casual just-for-fun workshopping of Much Ado turned into a film, almost on a whim. They all made the decision to go for it, and they shot it over a long weekend at Whedon’s house. I highly recommend the film. It’s very funny and charming but doesn’t soft pedal the cruelty of Claudio, the pain of Hero, the malevolence of Don John.
In my Merry Wives post, I mentioned our local community theatre. Every summer they put on a couple of Shakespere plays outside, on the little landing behind the theatre building. We go to all of them. But their programming is year-round, just not outside. My niece and I went to see Much Ado. I basically insisted upon it because I knew she would love it. She was around 13, 14, and was afraid she wouldn’t understand the language. I told her the language was easy, she would totally understand it, and I gave her the bare bones of the plot. As I have come to expect, the production was wonderful. They chose a sort of Jazz Age milieu, with bootleg drinks at the celebration, and Charleston dancing before the wedding, etc. All of the eavesdropping scenes were so funny, with Benedick at one point hiding in a trunk for the entirety of a scene, listening to the gossip above him. Knowing he was in there the whole entire time made the scene even more hilarious. Lucy was losing it! Our favorite guy, the high school librarian, who played Caius in Merry Wives played the sinister Don John – two totally different characters – and he played the whole thing as a kid’s temper tantrum (which actually made Don John make sense!) Two women played Beatrice and Benedick (this company doesn’t care about gender, refreshing, especially when you consider neither did Shakespeare. How could he, when men played all women’s parts? Thereby making most of the love banter a comment upon the performance of our roles as people in the world. This sort of subversion was baked in to the original, because everyone in the audience knew Juliet was actually a 13-year-old boy, or Rosalind – dressing up as a boy – was, therefore, a boy dressing up as a girl dressing up like a boy. At a certain point, we’re through the looking glass as far as gender is concerned.) And, just as I predicted, Lucy understood every word.
I love revisiting the strangeness of Much Ado About Nothing‘s world.
