Much Ado about Nothing

dimanche 3 septembre 2017
par MmesS

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare is a delightful comedy which plays out a number of Shakespeare’s best loved themes : confusion between lovers, the battle of the sexes, and the restoration of love and marriage.

It also features two of Shakespeare’s most formidable lovers : Benedick and Beatrice. These two characters spend the majority of the play bickering and then—as in all great romantic comedies—fall in love in the final acts.

Much Ado About Nothing begins in Messina, soon after the end of a war. A group of soldiers are returning, victorious. Amongst them are Don Pedro, Claudio (a handsome youth) and Benedick, who is known to be proficient both in the art of war and the art of speech. He is also a self-proclaimed woman-hater, who vows he will never settle down.

Soon, Claudio falls in love with a nobleman’s daughter, Hero (a beautiful and quiescent young maiden), and they decide to marry. Hero’s elder sister, Beatrice, is unlike her sister in that she has a fast tongue. She and Benedick enjoy baiting each other as both are clever and witty.

The lovers, along with the rest of Hero and Claudio’s wedding party, decide to bring Benedick and Beatrice together. They perceive, perhaps, that there is already a spark of love between them. By the time the wedding comes around, the two are very much in love. But love is never easy in Shakespeare’s plays, and on the eve of the wedding Don Pedro’s bastard brother, Don John, decides to break up the marriage before it begins by trying to convince Claudio that his betrothed has been unfaithful.

Claudio goes on to the wedding and calls Hero a whore, disgracing her before the whole community. Beatrice and Hero’s father hide the poor girl, and let it be known that she has died from the shame that Claudio unfairly placed upon her. In the meantime, Don John’s henchmen are arrested by the local constable (whose malapropisms create a little comic relief) and the plot to besmirch Hero’s name is exposed.

Claudio is wracked with grief. To make amends, he promises to marry Hero’s sister, Beatrice. However, when he reaches the altar and lifts his wife’s veil, he finds that he is marrying the woman he thought to be dead. The wedding is made into a double celebration when Benedick and Beatrice also decide to tie the knot.

The majority of the plot in Much Ado About Nothing revolves around Hero and Claudio, but Shakespeare’s dramatic sympathies remain very clear. Benedick and Beatrice are ever at the center of our attention. They get the most stage time, as well as the majority of the best lines. With their gentle bickering, they hope to expose the frailties not only of their opponent, but also of his or her entire gender. These interchanges are early examples of what would become the fast-paced exchanges in modern screwball comedy.

With Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare also creates the first example of the romantic generic convention of the two romantic leads that love to hate each other. That they are "tricked" into loving each other is only possible because that love already resides in their hearts. They use their mutual animosity to cover their true feelings.

Of course, Much Ado About Nothing is never simply just a romantic comedy.

Rather, the play creates a lighter, more frivolous counterpart to some of his darker tragedies. For example, like Romeo and Juilet, we see a lover pretend to be dead, hoping for a Romantic reconciliation with the man to whom she is betrothed. Unlike that tragedy, however, the lover does not realize his mistake too late.

The work is one of Shakespeare’s most serious comedies, and also one of his most human. The back-and-forth between Benedick and Beatrice, and the triumphant finale in which the divine grace of love is celebrated has had a feel-good effect on its audience down the centuries. Beautifully written, and beautiful in its conception, Much Ado About Nothing, is one of Shakespeare’s most delightful plays.

Themes in the play :

LOVE

Shakespeare’s treatment of love in Much Ado About Nothing differs from his other romantic comedies. Sure, it shares the same stagy plot, which finishes with the lovers finally getting back together, but Shakespeare also mocks the conventions of courtly love which was popular at the time.

Although Claudio and Hero’s courtly marriage is central to the plot, their relationship is the least interesting thing in the play.

Instead, our attention is drawn to Benedick and Beatrice’s unromantic backbiting – it is this relationship that seems more believable and enduring.

By contrasting these two different types of love, Shakespeare manages to poke fun at the conventions of courtly, romantic love. Claudio uses highly contrived language when speaking of love, which is undermined by Benedick and Beatrice’s banter : “Can the world buy such a Jewel ?” says Claudio of Hero. “My dear Lady disdain ! Are you yet living ?” says Benedick of Beatrice.

As an audience, we are supposed to share Benedick’s frustration with Claudio’s transparent, pompous rhetoric of love : “He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier … His words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.”

DECEPTION

As the title suggests, there is a lot of fuss over very little in the play – after all, if Claudio wasn’t so impetuous, Don John’s rather weak plan wouldn’t have worked at all !

What makes the plot so intricate is the use of deception throughout.

The most obvious example is when Don John falsely slanders Hero for his own mischief, which is countered by the Friar’s deception of pretending Hero is dead. The manipulation of Hero from both sides renders her a passive character throughout the play – she does very little and only becomes an interesting character through the other character’s deceptions.

Deception is also used as a force for good in the play, as in Beatrice and Benedick’s overhearing scenes. Here, the deception is used to great comic effect and to manipulate the two lovers into accepting each other. The use of deception to manipulate these characters is necessary because it is the only way they could be convinced to allow love into their lives.

It is interesting that all of Much Ado’s characters are so willing to be deceived – Claudio doesn’t stop to suspect Don John’s actions, both Benedick and Beatrice are willing to completely change their world view after the overhearing scenes, and Claudio is willing to marry a complete stranger to appease Leonato. Deception is weaved so closely into the play that it becomes second nature to its characters – indeed, the word “nothing” in the play’s title is believed to be a pun on the word “noting” (reflecting the use of written messages, eavesdropping and spying). Both words would have been pronounced similarly in the late 16th century.



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