Learning Objective – to explore some critical theory on the play ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’

1. Learning Objective – to explore some critical theory on the play ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’

2. Much Ado About Nothing is one of the few comedies set in a real geographic location – Messina/Sicily. The audience is easily able to make connections between what they are seeing on stage and the conventions and behaviours of their own society. Everyone knows everyone else’s business and if they don’t know it, they make it up!

3. The play’s realistic society is one in which the behaviour of the gentlefolk is ruled by strict conventions – especially regarding gender but also social hierarchy. In order to bring this about, the more conventional inhabitants of the play’s society must engage in deception and gossip, which they are delighted to do – but the play also shows the danger of such behaviour in a community.

4. The lovers do end up together but only after trials that are not so much caused by external (material) problems as by internal psychological barriers. GK Hunter:‘We may say that we come to know such people, but we know them as people carried to their fates rather than people achieving them.’

5. Witty language is brought into play by the protagonists as a way of dealing with both the attraction and the fear of falling in love. Most revolutionary, in dramatic terms is Shakespeare’s decision to focus on the emotional life of the central female character and make her story the play’s driving force. In none of his earlier comedies does he really depart from the central focus on the male protagonist.

6. Beatrice and Benedick indicate their unconventionality by the freedom of their language in addressing those above them as equal. This does not go unnoticed by their friends. Their final acknowledgement of love for each other and the necessity of marriage incorporates their rebellious energy into society and thereby revitalises it. There’s a sort of evolutionary instinct about the play it celebrates the sexual success of the smartest.

7. Benedick’s scene – Prose The audience see how the amateur theatrical performance of his friends has called Benedick into a new understanding of himself and the world. This understanding does not deprive him of he fertile wit and verbal energy but rather finds a productive role for them.

8. Beatrice’s scene – Blank Verse Beatrice by contrast is given much less opportunity for humour in her scene. Though she too must hide and react to what she hears. The scene’s blank verse creates a more serious mood than the prose of Benedick’s scene and Beatrice is in fact silent until her final soliloquy – she has no interjections as Benedick has when she does speak it is the form of the last 10 lines of a Shakesperean sonnet – with its typical complex scheme. The speech is addressed to her inner self and the absent Benedick, not the audience: we are privileged overhearers of her emotional life.