Much Ado About Nothing Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares

  Much Ado About Nothing

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Eleanor Lowe and Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Penelope Freedman (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright): Marianne Elliott, Nicholas Hytner

  Playing Beatrice: Harriet Walter

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Couples

  Tragedy Averted

  Much Ado About Noting

  Second Chance

  Double Ending

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  Much Ado About Nothing

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Much Ado About Nothing in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Much Ado: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Marianne Elliott and Nicholas Hytner

  Harriet Walter on Playing Beatrice

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s Man

  Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  COUPLES

  On what basis do you choose a partner with whom to share your life? Sexual desire or social compatibility? Surface appearance or inner character? And how much freedom should young people have in making such an important choice? Is there anything to be said for the older way of doing things whereby parents play a central part in the process of arrangement and approval? These questions are no less pressing in today’s multicultural societies than they were in the transitional age during which Shakespeare wrote his plays. And of all those plays, Much Ado About Nothing is the one that offers the most modern view of the game of boy meets girl that used to be called courtship.

  Shakespeare knew that human motives and interactions are never simple. One of his favorite devices for exploring the complexity of our affairs is the double plot. In ancient Athens, Aristotle had said that a good play needs unity of action in order to keep the audience’s focus. Shakespeare defied that rule and opted instead for stereoscopic vision. The double plot of Much Ado offers two versions of courtship. We might call them the romantic and the realistic, or the ancient and the modern.

  There is an old story that goes back to ancient Greek romance and that reappeared in the early Renaissance. It received its most influential telling in an epic Italian romance by Ludovico Ariosto called Orlando Furioso. It tells of how a girl is wrongly accused of infidelity to the man she loves. He is tricked into believing that he has witnessed her letting another man into her bedroom window. The trick is that he is actually witnessing another woman disguised as his beloved. Accusations fly and an unhappy ending seems inevitable, but after various twists and turns the lovers are reunited.

  This—adapted through various intermediary versions and reworked with many distinctively Shakespearean touches—is the origin of the Claudio and Hero story about which the play makes much ado. Coming as it does from the romance tradition, the relationship is focused on honor (a girl’s chastity is nonnegotiable) and on the combination of idealization and desire that we call “romantic love.” One of the intermediate versions of the story, also known to Shakespeare, introduced the element of social class: its main characters are a knightly follower of Piero, King of Aragon, and the daughter of the poor but honorable Lionato de’Lionati of Messina. From here, Shakespeare took a series of questions about what constitutes a suitable marriage, how to reconcile the romantic desires of the young with the more down-to-earth matters of status, respect, and money that are of concern to their parents.

  Hero is the archetypal romance heroine. Her identity is defined by her sexual honesty: the accusation of infidelity almost literally kills her. Claudio is also bound by traditional notions of honor. Appearance is everything and all that matters is what men say. He doesn’t believe Hero’s denials of the false accusations and neither does his lord, Don Pedro, who makes clear that men must stand together: “I stand dishonoured, that have gone about / To link my dear friend to a common stale” (a “stale” means a whore).

  Claudio’s friend Benedick is given a choice at the climax of the accusation scene: to stick with the men or to stand up for Hero. The person who forces him to make that choice is Hero’s cousin, Beatrice. She knows what is the right thing to do, but cannot do it herself because she is a woman: “Is a not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place.” If Benedick is to retain Beatrice’s respect, he will have to take on the role that she cannot: he will have to challenge his friend Claudio to a duel.

  The glorious relationship between Beatrice and Benedick has no equivalent in any of the older versions of the Claudio and Hero story. It is Shakespeare’s unique invention. And it takes over the audience’s interest. This is a completely different, completely new, astonishingly modern relationship. The starting point is not sexual desire, not the romantic idea of falling in love at first sight. Nor is it honor or status. Beatrice is an orphan, not a daughter to be married off as a commodity. There is a general assumption that she will end up as an old maid. Her dazzling wit is her only defense against the loneliness of her likely fate.

  We all know the problem with the romantic view of love: what is left when the gloss wears off, when the first mad passion is over? We have faith in Beatrice and Benedick because with them it is the other way around. Compatibility comes first, romance later. Their “merry war” of words reveals that they are intellectual equals and mutual respect will flow from there. “In each of them,” the actor Harriet Walter notes in her interview on playing the part of Beatrice, “submitting to love was linked with an idea of loss of power and control. But having had such a long drawn-out and often antagonistic courtship, they can be said to really know one another and to have seen the worst of one another.” A partnership based on equality and respect, not on idealization or status: that is what makes Beatrice and Benedick so very real and so very modern.

  TRAGEDY AVERTED

  Comedy is tragedy averted. A young woman prepares herself for marriage. Then we witness the ceremony itself. Whenever we go to a wed
ding we cannot help relishing the dramatic pause when the priest asks the couple, “If either of you know any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined, I charge you on your souls to utter it.” On this occasion the drama turns into a crisis: in front of the whole congregation Claudio the groom accuses Hero the bride of infidelity on the very eve of her wedding day. She faints, he storms out, her father says that he hopes she is dead since she has brought such shame on his household. The play has begun with the end of a war, a move from the language of martial bonding to that of courtship and coupling. Its atmosphere has been all holiday. No more.

  The change of mood extends even to the other pair of lovers. The relationship between Benedick and Beatrice has hitherto been characterized by sharp but always lighthearted banter; now Beatrice raises the stakes dramatically, forcing Benedick to choose between love and friendship. Suddenly we have moved into the Othello-world of sexual accusation and death threat. Don John, the chief plotter of all the mischief, is no Iago—he is a cardboard cut-out villain, an archetypal melancholy man (“I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man’s jests”)—so in our rational minds we do not believe he will triumph, but we end the fourth act feeling that a substantial act of atonement will be required of Claudio.

  Comedy makes room for little acts of grace; it allows the second chance that tragedy denies. In Much Ado, the grace comes from two agencies: the Friar who arranges the mock-death and resurrection of Hero, and the Watchmen who stumble upon the truth of Don John’s plot. We expect God to work his benign way through friars. It may seem strange that providence also works by means of the bumbling, malaprop-prone Dogberry. It is, however, one of the laws of the comic universe that appearance (“semblance”) is deceptive. Those who think they are clever, like Don John, end up looking foolish; those who we at first think are foolish, like Dogberry, turn out to be peculiarly wise. Their wisdom is that of the heart, not the intellect. Jesus said that to understand the kingdom of heaven one has to make oneself as a child: Dogberry, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is one of Shakespeare’s natural children. He is “condemned into everlasting redemption” for his simplicity and goodness.

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTING

  The play’s title is multiply suggestive. There is much ado about the nothing that Hero has done wrong. Shakespeare often makes “nothing” a euphemism for female genitals, because women lack a male “thing” between their legs, so there is an obscene second sense. “Nothing” seems to have been pronounced “noting,” which provides a further rich sense: the play is full of “noting” in the sense of watching and overhearing, whether in the famous scenes in which Benedick and Beatrice are deliberately allowed to overhear conversations of great interest to them, or the plan to let Claudio “witness” the infidelity of his betrothed. Messina is full of hearsay.

  Disguise is a closely related motif: Don Pedro woos Hero on behalf of, and in the guise of, Claudio. This plan is eavesdropped upon by scheming Borachio (“Being entertained for a perfumer, as I was smoking a musty room, comes me the prince and Claudio, hand in hand in sad conference. I whipped me behind the arras and there heard it agreed upon that the prince should woo Hero for himself, and having obtained her, give her to Count Claudio”) and also misheard by a servant of Leonato’s brother (“The prince and Count Claudio, walking in a thick-pleached alley in my orchard, were thus overheard by a man of mine: the prince discovered to Claudio that he loved my niece your daughter and meant to acknowledge it this night in a dance”). In each narrative of noting, an imagined detail—interlaced branches in a garden walk, a musty room hung with tapestry—creates a sense of location even as Shakespeare writes for a bare stage. As befits a work in which prose outweighs verse by a ratio of more than two to one, the texture of the play offers far more realism than romance: instead of the (sometimes parodically overblown) love-poetry we find in many of the other comedies, the focus here is on less hyperbolic but more heartfelt matters such as a bride’s delight in the precise fashion and cut of her wedding dress.

  It is unlikely to have taken a bright Elizabethan boy actor more than about an hour to learn the little part of Hero. Traditionally the leading actress—Dora Jordan in the eighteenth century, Ellen Terry in the nineteenth, Peggy Ashcroft in the twentieth—has played Beatrice, and one suspects that the Chamberlain’s Men’s best boy would have done so in the original Shakespearean production. Claudio says of Hero, “Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.” She is the embodiment of the silent woman, talked about far more than she talks. Hero says far less than the other major characters, but we hear her name more often than that of any other character. And when we begin to look at her in this light we come to the center of the play, for talking about people is the play’s central activity.

  SECOND CHANCE

  The early nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt was a great admirer of Hero’s fortitude. Writing about Much Ado in his book Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), he noted that “The justification of Hero in the end, and her restoration to the confidence and arms of her lover, is brought about by one of those temporary consignments to the grave of which Shakespeare seems to have been fond.” Hazlitt suggested that Shakespeare explained the theory behind this favorite plot twist in a crucial speech of the Friar’s:

  She dying, as it must so be maintained,

  Upon the instant that she was accused,

  Shall be lamented, pitied and excused

  Of every hearer, 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. So will it fare with Claudio:

  When he shall hear she died upon his words,

  Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep

  Into his study of imagination,

  And every lovely organ of her life

  Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,

  More moving-delicate and full of life,

  Into the eye and prospect of his soul

  Than when she lived indeed.

  Silence is associated with death, and Hero’s name is also associated with death: it is evocative of the title of the Roman poet Ovid’s highly influential tales of deserted and despairing lovers, the Heroides (as well as the name of one of the characters in that collection, Hero mourning for her drowned lover, Leander). Death is the logic of the Heroine’s exclusion from the first part of the play: in her habitual reticence, she is almost like a dead person from the start. But the Friar’s suggestion is a kind of appropriation of death: he recognizes that the kind of death into which Hero has been forced can become the basis for a new life. The moment people believe she really is dead, they will start to value her. His recognition of this is based on what Hazlitt calls the theory behind Shakespeare’s predilection for temporary consignments to the grave, namely the intuition of the human tendency not to value someone or something fully until we have lost it.

  The idea remained very important to Shakespeare right through to the end of his career. Prospero in The Tempest only realizes how much he loves Ariel when he releases him. The point about the temporary consignment to the grave is that it gives a second chance. It allows one to experience the loss that makes one value what one has lost, and then it gives back the lost object. And this time, so the theory goes, one will really value it. “Come, lady, die to live,” says the Friar: it is only the apparent death, played out in elaborate fullness, that can provide a sufficiently firm basis for a subsequent fullness of life. When Hero is brought back to the stage, the language dwells sustainedly on this notion of dying to live. Hero dies while her slanders lived and lives once they die.

  A temporary consignment to the grave is powerful in a play because a play serves a similar function. Claudio will come to value his Hero through having lived through her death. We will come to v
alue our Heros through living through the stage deaths of others like them. The great sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay on Cicero’s dictum “That to philosophize is to learn how to die”; Shakespeare would suggest that to play-go is to learn how to live by seeing others pretend to die. As defenders of the stage were quick to point out when the theater was attacked by puritans as immoral, the drama may serve an educative function for the audience. It may make us learn to value life through the surrogate experience of loss. Profound comedy must always be close to tragedy; the apparent death is necessary for the achievement of a comic fullness of life. One way of putting it would be to say that The Winter’s Tale, with its hinged tragicomic structure, is the logical conclusion of Shakespeare’s work. That play is certainly the fully matured reworking of Much Ado.

  The temporary consignment to the grave is not only an analogue for the audience’s experience in the theater, and for the tragic element in comedy, it is also central to most myths and religions. Christ spends three days in the grave; Christianity is built on the idea of dying to oneself in order to achieve fuller life in Christ. Shakespeare made much of certain classical myths of temporary death and rebirth: the dying god, Adonis; Proserpina, goddess of spring, who dies to live and who is the archetype of Marina and Perdita; Orpheus bringing Eurydice back from the underworld. The ultimate original for the Hero plot is a Greek myth, that of Alcestis. Shakespeare could conceivably have known a Latin translation of Euripides’ play on the subject, but he certainly received the story at second hand through the prose romances that were the direct sources of Much Ado.

  The plot of Alcestis may be summarized briefly: a man called Admetus is allowed an extra length of life, provided that at the appointed hour of his death someone else can be persuaded to die for him; Admetus’ father and mother refuse; Alcestis, his loyal wife, consents and accordingly dies; just after her death, Herakles happens to be passing, on his way to perform one of his labors; despite his wife’s recent death, Admetus entertains Herakles in accordance with the laws of hospitality; the latter discovers what has happened and goes to Death, the messenger who is taking Alcestis to the underworld, wrestles her from him and restores her to her husband, who by this time feels guilty and repentant that he has let her die in his place. The story is played out on the level of myth, not in a civic community like Shakespeare’s Messina, but the idea of a second chance is the key shared motif.