Much Ado About Nothing (Bard to the Bone #14)

Part of my effort to do remedial cultural capital accumulation and get up to speed with all the Shakespeare plays I had low or zero knowledge of….

Year written: 1599

Context of the writing (Shakespeare’s career, political events it was responding to): 

Just after Love’s Labour’s Lost and Merry Wives of Windsor, and before Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet – so… he’s “arriving”

Plot in a paragraph: Claudio and Benedick, back from a war, have the hots for Hero and Beatrice respectively.  Beatrice is classic screw-ball comedy – snarky etc. Hero is demur. Don John, for the shingles, makes Claudio think Hero is a harlot and he denounces her at what was supposed to be the wedding altar. Benedick and Beatrice have been tricked into confessing their love for each other, and now she tell Benedick he has to kill Claudio for being such a douche towards Hero.  Fortunately it does not quite come to this, and everything is straightened out for a dual wedding and the imminent punishment of Don John.  And they all live semi-happily after.

Things that worked well: Beatrice – she lights up the page and, presumably, the stage

Things that didn’t work well: Claudio’s repentance and Hero taking him back (not that she had all that many choices)

Favourite character: Beatrice, obvs

Words I learnt: 

Word	Definition
Recheat	Recheat – noun1. (in a hunt) the sounding of the horn to call back or signal to the houndsverb (intransitive)2. (of a huntsman) to sound a horn to call back or signal to the hounds in a hunt
Baldric	Baldric – a belt for a sword or other piece of equipment, worn over one shoulder and reaching down to the opposite hip.
Pleaching	Thick-pleached – Pleaching is a method of training trees to produce a narrow screen or hedge by tying in and interlacing flexible young shoots along a supporting framework. Use this technique to make walks, arbours, tunnels and arches.
Haggards	Haggards- A haggard was a hawk that had been caught for training after it had taken on its adult plumage (this meaning is still extant in falconry).
Rebato	Rebato – a large, stiff collar, fashionable from the late 16th to the mid 17th centuries, typically trimmed with lace.
Pish	Pish – strong exclamation of contempt, impatience, disgust
Foining	Foining-  to thrust with a pointed weapon : lunge
Scambling	Scambling – 1 obsolete : brawling, quarrelsome2 : carelessly done : makeshift, shoddy3 : irregularly spread out : scattered, ramblinga town scambling in all directions4 : awkwardly formed or executed : shamblinglittle clean punching and a lot of holding in a scambling bout Sunday Independent (Dublin

Lines worth knowing: 

Act scene lines	Character	Lines	Comment
Act 2, i. 17	Leonato	By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue.
Act 2, i , 165	Claudio	Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love.
2, ii,	Benedick	I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviors to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love
3,i, 218	Benedick	Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.
3, iii, 107-11	CONRAD	CONRADE  Is it possible that any villainy should be so dear?BORACHIO  Thou shouldst rather ask if it were possible any villainy should be so rich. For when rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will.
3, v	Claudio	O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!
3,v, 140
3,v, 230-7
4, i,	Claudio	She knows the heat of a luxurious bed.
4,1	Leonato	O she, is fall’n Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,	Compare washing hands clean – Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth – in blood stepped in so far that returning were as tedious as go o’er
4,i	Friar	For it so falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, Why then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us Whiles it was ours. S	Don’t it always seem to go you don’t know what you got till it’s gone…
4,ii	Beatrice	O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.
4,ii	Beatrice	But manhood is melted into curtsies, valor into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it.	Talk got cheap
5, ii. 70	Benedick	If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps.

Marc’s entirely subjective verdict and score out of 5 bards (ymmv): 4

Will I be tracking down movies of this? : yes, – the 1993 Branagh

How far would I travel to see a good production of this? London?  This I really would like to see.

Limericks

In the play of ‘ado’ there is much

On two weddings it turns too much

One bride is a hero

The groom near a zero

And a friar who helps in a clutch

AND

Benedick is stung by a Bea

With a lash of a tongue far too free

But their friends do contrive

To their matching arrive

As the baddie from Messina doth flee.

AND

The play’s about a snitch jacket

It made the young Bard a nice packet

There’s heaps of deception

Akin to “Inception”

Because love, after all, is a racket 

UPDATE

What other people think:

presumably there are a bunch of feminist analyses – let’s see what google scholar throws up…

Books/chapters/articles I might try to track down: 

Stelzer, E. 2024. “The story that is printed in her blood” Patriarchal Authority in Much Ado About Nothing and Its Sources. Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources

Podcasts and their contents

Date	Podcast	Episode title	Topic	Length	Score out of ten (ymmv)	Comments
	No Holds Bard	No Holds Bard: NHB 128 – So You’re Going To See MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING		36 mins	10	Great stuff
	Approaching Shakespeare	Much Ado About Nothing | University of Oxford Podcasts	Why are people so quick to believe Don John (hint – it’s the pervasive misogyny)	42 mins	10	Also great stuff
	Shakespeare Anyone	Much Ado About Nothing: Stuff to Chew On			9	Lots of nice factoids and perspectives