MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Handout by Natália Pikli, PhD
(possibly late 1598 - early 1599, good Quarto 1600, Folio 1623)
Charlton (Shakespearean Comedy, 1945) ’golden comedies’ = AYL,MA,TN
FESTIVE ATMOSPHERE – ends in a komos – DANCE = HARMONY in the macro/microcosm, spoilsports are off the stage (cf. comedy’s ’here and now’)
TITLE:
- genre/comedy – in retrospect ’much ado about nothing (= a trifle)’, as opposed to
Cordelia’s and tragedy’s destructive ’nothing’
- nothing – noting : a comedy of errors/overhearings/deceptions
- Elizabethan slang = the female sex organ (Partridge: Shakespeare’s Bawdy)
The constant oscillation between the possibility of tragedy and the necessity of comedy…
STRUCTURE
- (Sándor Hevesi) – ’a play in brackets’
WAR – (LOVE /war/ LOVE) – WAR ?
Operetta wars
’Hercules’s labours’
- main plot and subplot (Hero’s story < Bandello’s novelle and Belleforest Histoires
Tragiques: slander, fake death, regained innocence but named FENICIA, Hero < Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander, a tragic story)
CONVENTIONS: in love/wooing – cf. FASHION
Thomas Overbury’s description (1616) of ’An Amorist’:
”[An amorist] Is a certaine blasted or planet-stroken, and is the Dog the leads blind Cupid;
[…] He is never without verses, and muske confects; and sighs to the hazard of his buttons;
(…) Hee fights with passion, and looseth much of his blood by his weapon; dreames, thence
his paleness. His armes are carelessly used, as if their best use was nothing but embracements.
He is untrust, unbuttoned, and ungartered, not out of carelessness, but care; his farthest end
being but going to bed. (…) He answers not or not to the purpose; and no marvell, for he is
not at home. (…) His imagination is a foole, and it goes in a pide-coat of red and white;
shortly, he is translated out of a man into folly; his imagination is the glasse of lust, and
himself the traitor to his own discretion.” Qt.Berry Shakespeare’s Comic Rites, 53-54.
SATIRICAL (exclusive/punishment) or RENAISSANCE LAUGHTER (inclusive/festive)
BERGSON, A nevetés (Le Rire)
"First of all, laughter is punishment. Its designation is humiliation, and it must have a
torturing impact on the person it aims at. It is a form of punishment with the help of which
society retaliates licentiousness. Laughter would not achieve its purpose if it bore the marks of
sympathy and kindness." [Bergson: 157]
BAKHTIN, Rabelais and His World
According to the Rennaissance conception, laughter "has a deep philosophical meaning, it is
one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole [..] the world is seen
anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when is seen from the seriouos standpoint.
Therefore, laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as
seriousness. Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter." While the
17th c. and the following years regarded laughter as "not a universal, philosophical form", its
sphere is "narrow and specific (private and social vices)", "belongs to the low genres", being
only "a light amusement or a form of salutary social punishment of corrupt and low persons"
[Bakhtin: 66-67]. Cf. also, on medieval and early modern people "They could perceive the
oneness of the world", and "realize the essential relationship and the links holding together its
elements, which in the seventeeth century were to appear heterogeneous, and in the eighteenth
completely incompatible" [Bakhtin: 61].
TYPES OF LAUGHTER in MAdo
- ’Prince’s jester’, self-chosen fools, conscious role
- Clowns/ ass, ignorance
- ’corrective’ group laughter, intrigue (taming the shrews?)
- Welt-Verlachung (Jean Paul), ’devilish’ laughter at ’un-creation’
TYPES or INDIVIDUALISED CHARACTERS? OUTSIDERS AND/OR INSIDERS
– Shakespearean romantic comedy = losing/findig love AND identity
Cf.
Benedick – Latin Benedictus – ’he who is blessed’
Beatrice – Latin Beatrix – ’she who blesses’
(acted) COWARDICE and true BRAVERY
Individual and social identities – can they overlap?
playful and free criticism as ousiders vs sense of belonging and (fear of ) corruption
cf. Don John
- public/private: CLAUDIO: ”If I see anything tonight why I should not marry her tomorrow,
in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her." (III.2. 112-114)
FASHION the ’DEFORMED THIEF’
’THE MEN’S CLUB OF MESSINA’
- horns, cuckoldry, ’savage bull’/yoke
- bastards – (Bacon: by definition ’envious’)
- marriage/love – ’a fashionable garment’ (Cf. Leonato's remark to see Beatrice "one
day fitted with a husband", also Beatrice's rejection of Don Pedro's offer "your grace
is too costly to wear every day")
TRAGIC CHOICES
- nunnery
- ’Kill Claudio!’
- Amor bestialis (CLAUDIO: ”But you are more intemperate in your blood / Than
Venus, or those pamper’d animals / That rage in savage sensuality.” IV.1. 59-61)
- Fashionable people: impotent, sensitive and clever ones would destroy and kill, stupid
ones save the day (deus ex machina?)
rites – masquarade, marriage, tomb, rebirth
• Dogberry – grotesque/scaled-down version of Bottom - ass/coxcomb