Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing

Summary:

Freshly home from war, Don Pedro and two of his men, Claudio and Benedict, stay with a local lord Leonato, along with his daughter Hero and niece Beatrice. Claudio and Hero fall quickly in love, while Benedict and Beatrice engage in a merry war of words, seemingly at each other’s throats. Benedict and Beatrice are tricked into confessing their love for each other, while Claudio is tricked into leaving Hero at the altar, believing her to be unfaithful. These lies are brought to light and all ends happily, with both couples whisking off to be married.

What It’s About:

Love triumphs over deceit

The play's primary theme is the interplay of love and deceit, and how both are facilitated through the titular 'noting' - in Shakespeare's parlance the words noting and nothing were near-homophones, and as such the title becomes a many-layered pun that's more or less lost on modern audiences. The play is much ado about noting - characters taking note of conversations happening around them, eavesdropping and being misled. It’s also much ado about nothing - that is, things that are insignificant. These conversations are often false, or tricks being played on the listener meant to deceive; they amount to nothing. Add to that the fact that nothing was Elizabethan slang for vagina, and that much of the conflict in the play centers around accusations made against Hero’s chastity and faithfulness - accusations that ultimately prove to be unfounded and thus, much ado about nothing.

All that is to say that characters eavesdropping, spying, and gossiping about others, often misunderstanding or being misled, makes up the primary action of the play. Benedict and Beatrice's romance, spurred by Don Pedro tricking both into noting conversations about the other, and Claudio's abandonment of Hero at the altar thanks to Don John (Don Pedro’s villainous brother) tricking him into noting one of Hero’s maids indulging in a dalliance at Hero's window the night before her wedding are the most egregious examples. However, minor instances liter the play. Hero is initially wooed by Don Pedro in a mask, who acts on behalf of Claudio. Benedict also talks with Beatrice at that party, hiding behind a mask to gather her opinion on him. And at the resolution, Hero is presented to Claudio behind a veil, as he believes her to be dead and that he is instead marrying her cousin. Trickery runs concurrent with love throughout the play - sometimes it aids, often it hinders, but the two seem to be indelibly linked. However, it's only once the masks are removed and all stands revealed that we can have our two weddings and dancing that lightens hearts and heels.

If This Were A Movie:

This is about as modern a play as Shakespeare ever wrote, and frankly reads like the script of an early 2000s Rom Com once you know how to parse the language. Benedict and Beatrice will be very familiar to modern readers - two quick-witted, sarcastic characters who constantly mock both each other as well as the very concept of love. They’re especially fond of heaping scorn on each other, and the pair do not share a scene where there isn’t some form of sharp-tongued verbal banter. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a fair amount of textual evidence that despite this banter the two are deeply attracted to each other, and may have even been involved before - how much this is played up varies depending on the adaptation. But it will come as no shock to the modern reader that they ultimately end up together - that acerbic couple always winds up admitting their love at the end of the rom com.

It’s also interesting to note that, to modern sensibilities Benedict and Beatrice read like one of the few couples in Shakespeare that seem like they could exist in the 21st century. Courtly love and arranged have fallen out of style, but the concept of two sharp-tongued people who refuse to admit their true feelings and hide behind sarcastic quips? That’s something we’re all quite familiar with.

The Line From The Play That You Know:

Oh God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace. - Much Ado About Nothing 4.1.302-303

For such a witty and dialogue-driven play, there aren’t a whole lot of lines that have entered into the popular lexicon. The above is probably closest, from Beatrice’s ‘Kill Claudio’ scene, wherein both she and Benedict confess their love for each other, and wherein she implores Benedict to hold Claudio to account for the slanders he’s lobbied at her cousin Hero. Such a massive ordeal being made about Hero’s ‘purity’ - that is, her virginity - is definitely an artifact of the time, and can easily make Claudio into the least sympathetic character in the play, to the point where his eventual reunion with Hero at the play’s end feels a bit unearned. Various adaptations have tried to dance around this, and some even rewrite the ending, but as it stands it turns Beatrice’s speech into one of the strongest and most sympathetic bits within the play for an actress to sink her teeth into.

The Line You Should Know:

Only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her. - Much Ado About Nothing 1.1.142-144

No one delivers an insult quite like Shakespeare. This is Benedict’s line speaking of Hero, whom Claudio has fallen rapturously in love with, and speaks to both his generally pithy disposition as well as the fact that his eyes are clearly elsewhere. Benedict here is trying to talk his best friend and general running buddy from the war to calm down and not immediately leap head over heels for this girl. In his estimation, Hero is beautiful but hardly worth immediately going to the church over. Of course, this falls on deaf ears, otherwise there wouldn’t be a play.

Notable Adaptation:

Joss Whedon’s 2013 Much Ado About Nothing (available on Prime video) perfectly encapsulates how modern the text feels, as it is hands down the funniest adaptation of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. The film was essentially shot over the course of 12 days during a contractually mandated break from editing Avengers, and given that context it's easy to see why it is such a light, breezy, and frankly slightly tipsy film. Whedon essentially got all of his friends and frequent collaborators, brought them to his house for two weeks, got them a bit liquored up (per the director’s commentary those glasses aren’t filled with water), and shot a movie. You can tell everyone involved is simply having fun, and that sense of fun pervades the entire project as a result.

This is also one of my favorite adaptations for showing just how much context actors can bring to Shakespearean dialogue. Despite being a self-professed nerd for these plays, I’ll be the first to admit that the text is hard to understand from the perspective of a modern English speaker. Here, the cast does so much work with their physicality and non-verbal expression in conveying the meaning that the lines land, even if you don’t have a perfect understanding of what phrases like “hang my bugle in an invisible baldric” mean.

General Notes:

Let’s talk a bit about Benedict and Beatrice, as they are really the breakout stars of the play and, at least in modern adaptations, have come to overwhelm everything else. Despite this, they are not the leads, or at least they're not central to the primary conflict of the play: Claudio being tricked into believing Hero has been unfaithful and abandoning her at the altar. They certainly circle around this action, with Beatrice remaining by Hero’s side and Benedict coming to her defense and ultimately challenging Claudio to a duel over the fact that he has slandered Hero. However, neither is in any way critical to that plot, and the majority of their story is resolved entirely separately. In fact, past stagings of various Shakespeare plays (notably Measure for Measure) have lifted Beatrice and Benedict whole cloth, and dropped them into entirely different works with no ill effects on the storyline.

How much does this matter? It's possible (and most modern adaptations go this way) to treat Claudio and Hero as, at best, a B-plot; background events over which Benedict and Beatrice engage in their merry little duel of wits. While this may not be the most faithful adaptation of the work, it’s certainly the most entertaining. Both characters are clearly written as the stars of the piece, getting all the best lines, and usually get top billing when it comes to casting. It also is the most attractive way of adapting the source material for a modern audience. As mentioned above, the Claudio/Hero plot rings a bit oddly to modern ears in its approach to gender politics, while the Beatrice/Benedict romance feels distinctly modern - the kid of witty, will they/won’t they banter that moderns sitcoms can grind three seasons’ worth of material out of. For good or bad, this is how the text has evolved over the years. However, I can’t help but believe that Shakespeare knew what he was doing - that in some ways this was all intentional. He was (spoilers) a pretty good writer, and there’s no way any writer worth their salt could write two characters like Beatrice and Benedict and not realize that they were the ones the audience was going to fall in love with.

A Monologue For the Road:

I didn’t even get to mention Dogberry, so I’ll leave you with this.

Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? Oh, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass. Thought it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass...I am a wise fellow, and which is more, an officer, and which is more, a householder, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina - Much Ado About Nothing 4.2.66-73