My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor

Much Ado About Nothing

I sometimes forget how very very strange Much Ado About Nothing is. Beatrice and Benedick are the scene stealers, their witty sometimes biting back and forth – covering up their longing for one another – they are living examples of “you both protest too much” … they are so dazzling, their chemistry sparking off the page over 400 years later… in other words, they are the only game in town. When you think Much Ado About Nothing, you think of them.

But … Beatrice and Benedick are not the leads. They’re always AROUND, but the play is an ensemble piece, and the main plot-line belongs to Claudio and Hero, a brief nearly silent romance which goes south at the altar, due to the lying scheming brother of the Prince (like, what is your DEAL, bro), who spread rumors about Hero, set up Claudio to doubt her chastity. The treachery is real, the betrayal catastrophic, seemingly insurmountable. The solution to the conundrum is suggested by the priest – one of the only truly helpful priests in Shakespeare’s entire canon. His priests usually veer from incompetent to downright corrupt and/or evil. So the priest comes up with a WILD plan. He wants to fake Hero’s death, launch a whirlwind of community mourning, led by Claudio, the now penitent man who was the cause of her disgrace. But then, the cherry on top: we will PRETEND that the still-alive Hero, in hiding due to the shame, is her own cousin, who looks exactly like her (just like Maddie in Twin Peaks). To “make up” for his awfulness, Claudio will marry this cousin, sight unseen. I guess as long as they look exactly alike then what’s the difference?

Like, this is a LOT and it takes up most of the air-space in the script. Beatrice and Benedick are onlookers to the unfolding tragedy, they get roped into it due to their care for Hero and Claudio, and they seem – frankly – like the only grown-ups onstage. They are not ingenues. They are seasoned. They’ve clearly already had a relationship. There is a treacherous maid, the treacherous brother and his two “knaves” who skulk around the manor making mischief – for no discernible reason. To round things out, there’s a group of “watchmen”, tasked with policing the grounds. They are led by Dogberry, puffed up with his own ego, but struggling mightily with language. He insists on using this lofty tone, and yet he doesn’t have the vocabulary. It’s malaprop after malaprop. You can tell what he means, in every instance, but he’s reaching towards something that isn’t there. When he arrests Borachio and Conrade he says, “Masters, never speak, we charge you, let us obey you to go with us.” What he MEANS to say is “…Please obey, and come with us.” “Let us obey you to go with us.” hahaha

There is so much eavesdropping in this play! People barely have enough time to plan for the wedding, they are so busy staging conversations for the person they know is listening. There’s a masked ball, where no one knows who anyone is. Lots of dirt is dished. The entire family decides to join forces to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love and … honestly, they don’t have to work that hard. Their love for each other is obvious from the start. They just needed the nudge, the sign that the coast was clear.

The revelation of their love comes just before the devastating wedding and Claudio’s horrible behavior. This leads to one of the most shocking moments in any Shakespeare play. Beatrice and Benedick have melted together, they still banter but they are now soft and open, admitting their feelings. Benedick pleads with her, “Come, tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” Whatever he might have hoped she’d say, whatever we in the audience might expect her to say – something soft and loving – she says, “Kill Claudio.”

I’ve seen this play many times and there are shocked gasps from the audience. And she MEANS it. She basically breaks up with him immediately when he hesitates. They’ve barely gotten together and she’s telling him to murder someone!

The play is called a comedy but … the overall sensation is uneasiness. There’s real terror and grief and horrific behavior. Honor has to die and then pretend to be her own cousin to find happiness. You don’t get stuff like this in Midsummer or As You Like It. Joy is threatened here, the happy ending is conditional, you find your love but there are still really bad actors out there. Claudio’s behavior is reprehensible, even more so since he seemed so nice and tender. (He is the Nice Guy^TM. Look out for them. They’ll slut-shame you at the earliest opportunity.) Don John is a sociopath emissary from another play, and somehow he seems worse than Iago, although Iago is bad enough! But Othello is a mighty tragedy, and there Iago makes sense, even with his – as Coleridge calls it – “motiveless malignity.” Don John is sinister. What the hell is he doing in a romantic comedy?

The strangeness of tone is fascinating, especially since his next comedy is not only one of his best but one of the best comedies ever. Here, tragedy looms. In As You Like It, there’s pure joy coming out of overwhelming longing – longing that is sweet. Most noticeable, though, is As You Like It‘s prioritization of play above all else. Rosalind practices wooing with Orlando. She trains him through role play. It’s a game. Much Ado also features play, with all the mini “scenes” of people having audacious phony conversations so the person hiding in the corner can hear. This, too, is play. In As You Like It, though, play totally takes over. Play’s the thing. Don John would be laughed out of the forest.

Having gone through the sonnets, and drinking up Stephen Booth’s unbelievable footnotes, some of which stretch for ten pages, I have some thoughts on the title. At first glance, the title seems like a throw-away. Much Ado About Nothing means … you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill, you’re getting all worked up over nothing, calm down it’s not that deep, etc. Maybe this would fit for Merry Wives where the stakes are nearly nonexistent but here? The title doesn’t fit at ALL if you take it at surface level! There’s so much at stake in Much Ado. “Nothing” is a big word to Shakespeare, though. “Nothing” is everywhere. Cordelia’s “nothing” in King Lear is the most famous “nothing” in Shakespeare’s body of work. You can’t say her “nothing” means “no big deal”. Nothing is not a dead end, it’s endlessness. Booth’s breakdown of the multiple layers of associations with “nothing” was a permanent perspective-change. Once you know about the nothing thing, you see nothing everywhere. You grasp/grok the deeper meanings. And here it’s in the title! Pay attention!

“Nothing” has multiple layers of meaning. In one way you can think about it like “nothing” can also mean “everything”, like the infinity inside of a circle. Nothing is a starting point: anything can happen if you start with “nothing”. But – of course – there’s a sexual slang connotation. “Thing” was slang for penis and therefore if you have “no thing” then you see where we’re going. Gives Much Ado About Nothing a very different connotation than “Much Ado About Fluff”. So the “no thing” and “everything” comes straight from Stephen Booth, and one of the main topics of conversation and controversy in Much Ado is Hero’s virginity. She literally has to fake her own death in order to avoid the shame, which she shouldn’t even feel ANYway because she is guilty of nothing. (Nothing). And so here: Vaginas are a BIG deal even though the slang term describes what they are NOT. (Kinda like the Latin root of “pudendum” being “shame”. Misogyny baked into the language. If the Latin root for “penis” was also “shame” maybe it would be a different story, but no, the root for “penis” is “tail”, descriptive – sort of – of what it is as a body part. There’s no judgment attached to it.) In my research, I learned another potential meaning from Marjorie Garber. “Nothing” in Elizabethan English was pronounced “noting” – at least this is what people who know things believe – and Much Ado About Nothing or “Noting” – is FILLED with the word “note” (as well as “nothing”). Taking notes: Much Ado closes with the reveal of a torn-up sonnet, and earlier we watch Benedick struggling to write said sonnet. “Taking note of” means “paying attention” and/or “noticing”, and in this play where everyone keeps a close eye on everyone else “noting” is more than relevant. “Noting” is all anyone does in Much Ado. Take note (see how I did that?) of how many times the words “nothing” “none” “note” “noting” and, hell, “nobody” or even “no” show up in the play. I started a tally and finally gave up because it was tedious (“Neighbors, you are tedious”) and neverending. Suffice to say: examples on nearly on every page.

While Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version is so good, I also love Joss Whedon’s version from 2013, starring Amy Acker, Alexis Denisoff, Nathan Fillion (as the aforementioned Dogberry: hilarious), and many other people from Whedon’s repertory. Apparently Whedon hosts gatherings where all his actor friends come over for a night of Shakespeare. Their casual just-for-fun workshopping of Much Ado turned into a film, almost on a whim. They all made the decision to go for it, and they shot it over a long weekend at Whedon’s house. I highly recommend the film. It’s very funny and charming but doesn’t soft pedal the cruelty of Claudio, the pain of Hero, the malevolence of Don John.

In my Merry Wives post, I mentioned our local community theatre. Every summer they put on a couple of Shakespere plays outside, on the little landing behind the theatre building. We go to all of them. But their programming is year-round, just not outside. My niece and I went to see Much Ado. I basically insisted upon it because I knew she would love it. She was around 13, 14, and was afraid she wouldn’t understand the language. I told her the language was easy, she would totally understand it, and I gave her the bare bones of the plot. As I have come to expect, the production was wonderful. They chose a sort of Jazz Age milieu, with bootleg drinks at the celebration, and Charleston dancing before the wedding, etc. All of the eavesdropping scenes were so funny, with Benedick at one point hiding in a trunk for the entirety of a scene, listening to the gossip above him. Knowing he was in there the whole entire time made the scene even more hilarious. Lucy was losing it! Our favorite guy, the high school librarian, who played Caius in Merry Wives played the sinister Don John – two totally different characters – and he played the whole thing as a kid’s temper tantrum (which actually made Don John make sense!) Two women played Beatrice and Benedick (this company doesn’t care about gender, refreshing, especially when you consider neither did Shakespeare. How could he, when men played all women’s parts? Thereby making most of the love banter a comment upon the performance of our roles as people in the world. This sort of subversion was baked in to the original, because everyone in the audience knew Juliet was actually a 13-year-old boy, or Rosalind – dressing up as a boy – was, therefore, a boy dressing up as a girl dressing up like a boy. At a certain point, we’re through the looking glass as far as gender is concerned.) And, just as I predicted, Lucy understood every word.

I love revisiting the strangeness of Much Ado About Nothing‘s world.

Quotes on the play

 

“Shakespeare had such intellect that the temptation to become a satirist, to surrender to the bastard type of poetry that satire is, must have been terrific. There must have come a moment when, like his own Beatrice, he said, ‘Contempt, farewell!’ That was a supreme moment. Even after it the foe rose to smite him. But he smote it.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Take away from the Much Ado About Nothing all that which is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action; — take away Benedick, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the character of Hero, — and what will remain? In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character; in Shakespeare, it is so, or is not so, as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the main-spring of the plot of the play; but he is merely shown and then withdrawn.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Recapitulation and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Plays”

“The conventions of love-making are criticized in the courtship of Berowne and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which Rosaline is superior, and in the courtship and marriage of Petruchio and Katharina in Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio is superior. Benedick and Beatrice mark the first time that both sides are equally matured. Both are critics of Petrarchan convention, and both hate sentimentality because they value feeling. When they really love, they speak directly.”
— W.H. Auden 1946 lecture

“Nothing is thus practically a synonym for creativity. It is that realm of pure possibility that alone makes freedom possible … Shakespeare delighted in using the word ‘nothing’ in this high metaphysical sense. Much Ado About Nothing is dedicated to this idea of Nothing. It is full of lies, deceptions (innocent and not so innocent) and imagination and these things grade into one another as imperceptibly as darkness dives into light … The extremes — namely, lies and imagination — are seen to be as opposite as night and noon.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Much Ado About Nothing is saturated with the idea of the power of Nothing (of the creative ingredient of the imagination, that is) to alter the nature of things for good or ill.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The play is full of phrases that imply this fluidity of facts, their willingness to flow for good or evil into any mold the human mind makes for their reception.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“But it is the underplot, or, as we might call it, the second main plot, that confirms the theme and proves that we are not reading things into Shakespeare’s play in making it center about Nothing. Beatrice and Benedick are in love with each other without knowing it… Sensing the existence of the seed, [their friends] brought just enough ‘nothing’ to bear on it in the form of imaginative sunshine to bring it to the flower of actuality, to give to that ‘airy nothing’ a local habitation and a name. They merely give nature a nudge, as it were.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“It is [Shakespeare’s] own as well as Benedick’s repudiation of ‘wit,’ his own as well as Beatrice’s farewell to contempt, his own as well as their declaration of independence of the past. He still had to write two more comedies, to be sure, in a not wholly different vein (As You Like It and Twelfth Night), in which to develop and consolidate that declaration of independence and step further in the direction in which his genius was leading him. More than that. He had to write three dark and in some respects perplexing plays (All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure) and are tragedy centered around a figure of measureless contempt (Hamlet), before the dragon of satire was slain and he could emerge on the mountain peaks of pure tragedy. That Shakespeare’s supreme accomplishment took place on those heights the world has come pretty nearly to agree.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Everything conspires to show that though he seldom used words more brilliantly than in this very play his attitude toward them was growing more and more like Hamlet’s “Words, words, words … Words can say only a little.’ But they can reveal a great deal by what they conceal. This is the difference between wit and poetry. In this sense Shakespeare was getting less and less interested in wit and more and more interested in poetry.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“For absolute power of composition, for faultless balance and blameless rectitude of design, there is unquestionably no creation of [Shakespeare’s] hand that will bear comparison with Much Ado About Nothing.”
–Algernon Swinburne

“It is as if Shakespeare said to himself, ‘I’ll do it once more, give them what they want as utterly as I can, and then be done with that sort of stuff forever.’ And he was done with it. There is plenty of wit in later plays but never again does it occupy the central position that it does here.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Beatrice can talk, but the play is nearing its end before we have full evidence that she can act and love as well as talk. But Rosalind can act and love from the beginning and her wit is exercised mainly in the service of love and not for its own sake. Just where between Beatrice and Desdemona Rosalind comes in it would be hard to say. But the point is that she does come between them.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Much Ado About Nothing provides another case of contrast, with the comic light duel of wits in the foreground and the dark malic of Don John in the background. How does Shakespeare keep the tragic plot from getting too serioius? He treats it perfunctorily as a background.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“It is Antonio who really feels, Leonato who puts on an act.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Much Ado About Nothing is not one of Shakespeare’s best plays, but Benedick and Beatrice are the most lovable, amusing, and good people — the best of combinations — he ever created.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“The great verbal dexterity of Beatrice and Benedick is paralleled by the great verbal ineptitude of Dogberry, an ineptitude which itself becomes art. All three love words and have good will.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Beatrice and Benedick mistake their reactions against the conventions of love for lovelessness.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

I mean… #ifeelseen

“[Don John takes] a negative position outside the group, like Shylock, as opposed to a character like Faulconbridge, who is an outsider with a positive attitude.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Don John’s discontent is infinite. His view of marriage is superficially like Benedick and Beatrice’s, but his motive is the hatred of happiness. Like the Devil, he wants to be unique.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“At the end one feels absolutely confident of the success of [Beatrice and Benedick’s] marriage, more than of other marriages in Shakespeare. They have creative intelligence, good will, a lack of sentimentality, and an ability to be open and direct with each other in a society in which such directness is uncommon.”
–W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“[Beatrice] not only turns [Benedick] but all things into jest, and a proof against everything serious.”
–William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Perhaps that middle point of comedy was never more nicely hit in which the ludicrous blends with the tender, and our follies turning round against themselves in support of our affections, retains nothing but their humanity.”
–William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Dogberry and Verges in this play are inimitable specimens of quaint blundering and misprisions of meaning; and are a standing record of that formal gravity of pretension and total want of common understanding, which Shakespeare no doubt copied from real life, and which in the course of 200 years appear to have ascended from the lowest to the highest offices in the state.”
–William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Still true, sadly.

“In his comic scenes, he seems to produce without labour what no labour can improve. His tragedy seems to skill, his comedy to be instinct.”
— Dr. Johnson

Fascinating.

“Even so early a tone is set for the play which the somber doings of Hero and Claudio will find it difficult to destroy. A wall of brass-bright words begins to be erected, a wall which terror perhaps will never pierce.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Don John’s hatred of love, however serious it may be, is stupidly stated and sounds harmless in the envelope of banter into which Shakespeare has slipped it. The plot nevertheless is thickening and a complication potentially as grave as that of Othello, and indeed analogues to it, commences to declare itself.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Benedick and Beatrice draw a clear circle of wit about the play to keep its tragedy in place. Dogberry and his fellows are a coarse tallow candle burning near the center, keeping the comic peace.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Talk is the business of Much Ado.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Beatrice can scarcely be imagined in love with a man who is a poet all the time. Benedick never is. Finding himself in love he tries to show it in rhyme, but he can think of nothing better than ‘baby’ to go with ‘lady’, ‘horn’ with ‘scorn’ and ‘fool’ with ‘school’. He is of course not far distant from Hotspur, who with him helps to say for Shakespeare that verse, at any rate for the time being, seems limited as a channel when the full tide of life comes pouring through.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The prose of Beatrice and Benedick is a brilliant brocade of artifice. But in counterpoint of antithesis and epithet is natural to two such desperate defenders of pride against the leveling guns of love, of personality against passion. It is a logical language for persons who seldom say what they mean, and who, since they love nothing better than talk, must talk always for effect. It is the inevitable idiom for lovers who would deny their love.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Benedick is a virtuoso in hyperbole, and is so much at home in the language of lies that he can make prose music out of rare silken terms thrust suddenly among russet yeas and noes. ‘With such impossible conveyance,’ ‘as horrible as her terminations,’ ‘do you say embassage’ — this is the accent of Hamlet as he holds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the far end of his tongue, and it is the accent indeed of any gentleman in Shakespeare when his mind races ahead of his discourse.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Beatrice is so much in love with words that she can even be impatient with the silence of others. ‘Speak, count, ’tis your cue,’ she cries to Claudio when he stands, tongue-tied.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“But we see through such wit as through a prism, and the love we behold is all the more convincing because of the refraction.”
–Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“…forerunner of Restoration stage comedy of the 18th and 19th century ‘comedy of manners’ and of what came to be called ‘screwball comedy’.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“…a constant subtext of unarticulated pain and loss.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

That’s what I’m talking about!

“The contrast between two pairs of lovers, one unconventional, resistant, and highly skilled at verbal sparring, the other apparently compliant and conventional, and reticent, had been used with great success by Shakespeare in an earlier play, The Taming of the Shrew. In other romantic comedies, from A Midsummer Night’s Dreqm to The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, the two ‘high’, or aristocratic, pairs, are more like than unlike, despite some minor differences (Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver). But Beatrice and Benedick are perhaps a little older, and in any case more worldly — and more wordy — than the tongue-tied Hero and Claudio.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Much Ado About Nothing is indeed, in many ways, Shakespeare’s great play about gossip. Everything is overheard, misheard, or constructed on purpose for eavesdropping. If Taming of the Shrew is one comparison for this play, another, less benign, is Othello, and in fact the three Shakespearean ‘jealousy’ plays, Much Ado, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale, are often, and fruitfully, compared. In this play, as we will see, the ‘Iago figure’ is Don John. Here, as in the tragedy of Othello and the tragic-comedy of The Winter’s Tale, a jealous man thinks he sees his beloved dallying with another man. But in this case the scene has been staged in order to deceive.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On Beatrice’s “O God that I were a man!”

“It is worth noting that in other Shakespeare comedies of this period the heroine does become a man, at least for a little while. Portia, Rosalind, and Viola all cross-dress, assuming male costumes and names in order to perform some act of rescue, release, or revenge. But Beatrice has this option only in the wishful form of a condition contrary to fact. Much Ado About Nothing is a play that engages topics like male bonding and female disempowerment, for all the powerful figures in Messina are men. There are no mothers.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Don John is a catalyst, or, perhaps, more symbolically, a personification of the problems that are bound to rise between two innocent, inexperienced, and silent lovers in a world that depends on language.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“This potentially tragic scenario of noting and false noting, making something out of ‘nothing’ – has its counterpart in the comic gulling of those impervious sophisticates, Beatrice and Benedick.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On “Come, lady, die to live”:

“Paradox is the chief rhetorical device of the play, and this resonant phrase is its perfect embodiment.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“This is a play that several times comes dangerously close to tragedy. Beatrice’s command to her lover, ‘Kill Claudio,’ is a turning point in more ways than one, as actors and directors must struggle to retain the sincerity of the moment at the same time that this earnest entreaty breaks the tone and the frame, of all their previous banter. They are adults, these two.”
–Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Hamlet carried on from Falstaff and Rosalind with a darker wit and with a ravening intelligence unequaled in literature. Beatrice and Benedick are slight in this sequence, but it is important to recognize that they dominate their play only because Shakespeare endows them with courtly versions of Falstaff’s primal exuberance and cognitive power.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Written just after the rejection of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2, just before the rejecting Hal’s equivocal triumph in Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing retains overtones of Falstaffian intelligence and wit …”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Each [Beatruce and Benedick] is a great nihilist. Much Ado About Nothing is certainly the most amiably nihilistic play ever written, and is most appositely titled. Nietzschean long before Nietzsche, Beatrice and Benedick are also Congreveans before Congreve. With every exchange between the fencing lovers, the abyss glitters, and their mutual wit does not so much defend against other selves as it defends against meaninglessness.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Beatrice anticipates Rosalind in her realism. Rosalind’s touch is lighter … Beatrice frequently is on the edge of bitterness … Dancing together, Beatrice wounds Benedick sufficiently so that the hurt lasts.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare’s inventive exuberance in Much Ado About Nothing is lavished upon Beatrice, who is a solitary eminence in the play. Benedick, the audience sympathetically feels, does his best to keep up, while Dogberry (alas) seems to be one of Shakespeare’s few failures at comedy.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Wrong, Harold, wrong.

“Beatrice is not only the play’s sole glory, she is as much its genius as Rosalind is the guiding spirit of As You Like It… The fascination of Beatrice is founded upon her extraordinary blend of merriment and bitterness, in contrast to the simpler Kate the Shrew. Beatrice has more affinity to the dark Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost, though Rosaline’s merriment is not very innocent…[Beatrice’s] warranted regard for herself is partly why the audience delights in her; it echoes Falstaff’s magnificent appreciation of his own comic intelligence…Her wildness is her freedom and this sense of liberty, more even than her wit, captures her audience.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“How then does one answer the question: What is the definition of love in Much Ado About Nothing? The prime answer is there in the title: Love is much ado about nothing. What binds and will hold Beatrice and Benedick together in their mutual knowledge and acceptance of this benign nihilism.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Protesting even while kissing, Beatrice will not speak again in Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare must have felt that, for now, she and the audience were at one. Two of the most intelligent and erngetic of Shakespeare’s nihilists, neither of them likely to be outraged or defeated, will take their changes together.”
–Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“When Berlioz, in 1861, turned Much Ado About Nothing into an opera, he retitled it Béatrice et Bénédict…Berlioz’s emphases on Beatrice and Benedic at the expense of what is, strictly speaking, the main plot of Shakespeare’s comedy is familiar: a reflection of the way actors, audiences, and readers have tended to react for several hundred years.”
–Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“King Charles I, in his personal copy of Shakespeare’s second Folio, altered the play’s title as Berlioz did, proclaiming his own interest in the witty lovers rather than their romantic opposites.”
–Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Don John has no interest whatever in Hero herself. A man incapable of any genuine human relationship, he is not even Claudio’s friend, let alone his rival in love. Don John is a malcontent pure and simple, a man who might say with the cold duke in Thurber’s story The Thirteen Clocks, ‘We all have faults, and mine is doing wickedness.” Certainly Shakespeare makes no attempt to provide him with even the kind of fairy-tale motivation that Oliver has for practicing against the life of his younger brother in As You Like It. A thing of darkness, out of step with his society, he hates the children of light simply because they generate radiance in a world he prefers to see dark.”
–Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“[Claudio’s] practicality … is not exactly held against him, but it does explain the ease with which he believes Don John’s slanders, and the unconsidered violence with which he shames Hero and casts her off. Essentially, Claudio is a man who thinks he has been duped in a bargain, not a Troilus whose whole world shatters around him because he has to recognize that the goddess of his idolatry is false.”
–Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Yet there is a sense in which the threat of death and disaster in this play has never possessed the kind of seriousness or urgency which it has, for instance, in The Merchant of Venice or Measure for Measure.”
–Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

 

A kind overflow of kindness. There are no faces truer than those that are so washed. How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!
— LEONATO, I.I.26-29

… challeng’d Cupid at the flight …
— BEATRICE, I.i.40

But how many hath he kill’d? for indeed I promis’d to eat all of his killing.
— BEATRICE, I.i.43-45

“he is no less than a stuff’d man. But for the stuffing — well, we are all mortal.”
— BEATRICE, I.i.56-60

MESSENGER:
I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books.
BEATRICE:
No, and he were, I would burn my study.
— I.i.78-80

LEONATO:
You will never run mad, niece.
BEATRICE:
No, not till a hot January.
— I.i.93-94

Truly the lady fathers herself. Be happy, lady, for you are like an honorable father.
— DON PEDRO, I.i.110-112

And would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none.
— BEAATRICE, I.i.126-127

I thank God and my cold blood I am of your humor for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.
— BEATRICE, I.i.130-132

She is so quotable I could put every line here.

Is’t come to this? In faith, ahth not the world one man but he will wear his cap with suspicion? Shall I never see a bachelor of threesome again?
— BENEDICK, I.i.197-199

That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most humble thanks. But that I will have a rechate winded in my forehead or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none. And the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.
— BENEDICK, I.i.238-246

BEATRICE:
I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick, nobody marks you.
BENEDICK:
What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you not yet living?
I.i.116-119

CONRADE:
What the good-year, my lord, why are you that out of measure sad?
DON JOHN:
There is no measure in the occasion that breeds, therefore the sadness is without limit.
— II.iii.1-5

Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues
Let every eye negotiate for itself.
And trust no agent, for beauty is a witch
Against whose charm faith melteth with blood.
— CLAUDIO, II.i.177-180

Silence is the perfectest heralt of joy; I were but little happy, if I could say so much!
— CLAUDIO, II.i.306-307

Your Grace is too costly to wear every day. But I beseech your Grace pardon me, I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
— BEATRICE, II.i.328-330

DON PEDRO:
For art a question, you were born in a merry hour.
BEATRIC;
No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there was a star danc’d, and under that I was born.
— II.i.332-335

Maybe my favorite of her lines.

She speaks poniards, and every word stabs.
— BENEDICK, II.i.247

There’s little of the melancholy element in her, my lord. She is never sad but when she sleeps, and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and wak’d herself with laughing.
— LEONATO, II.i.341-346

If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer; his glory shall be ours, for we are the only love-gods.
— DON PEDRO, II.i.384-386

DON PEDRO:
… Or if thou wilt hold larger argument,
Do it in notes.
BALTHASAR:
Note this before my notes.
There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.
DON PEDRO:
Why, these are very crotches that he speaks.
Note notes, forsooth, and nothing.
— II.iii.53-57

Count the “notes”! It ends with “nothing”!

She loes him with an enrag’d affection; it is past the infinite of thought.
— LEONATO, II.iii.100-101

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
— BENEDICK, II.iii.243

Shall wuips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor? No, the world must be peopled.”
— BENEDICK, II.iii.240-242

I so love the line “The world must be peopled”. Strangely romantic.

Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.
— BENEDICK, III.ii.28-29

BORACHIO:
Thou knowest that the fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak, is nothing to a man.
CONRADE:
Yes, it is apparel.
BORACHIO:
I mean the fashion.
CONRADE: Yes, the fashion is the fashion.
–III.iii.117-121

BEATRICE:
Benedictus! why benedictus? You have some moral in this benedictus.
MARGARET:
Moral? No, by my troth, I have no moral meaning; I meant plain holy thistle. You may think perchance that I think you are in love. Nay, by ’r Lady, I am not such a fool to think what I list, nor I list not to think what I can, nor indeed I cannot think, if I would think my heart out of thinking, that you are in love or that you will be in love or that you can be in love. Yet Benedick was such another, and now is he become a man. He swore he would never marry, and yet now, in despite of his heart, he eats his meat without grudging. And how you may be converted I know not, but methinks you look with your eyes as other women do.
BEATRICE:
What pace is this that thy tongue keeps?
MARGARET:
Not a false gallop.
— III.iv.77-94

DOGBERRY:
Comparisons are odorous — palabras, neighbor Verges.
LEONATO:
Neighbors, you are tedious.
— III.vi.16-18

This looks not like a nuptial.
— CLAUDIO, IV.I.68

But mine, and mine I loved, and mine I prais’d,
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her—why she, O she, is fall’n
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul tainted flesh.
— LEONATO, IV.i.136-141

For it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost,
Why then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours.
— FRIAR, IV.i.217-222

BENEDICK:
I do love nothing in the world so well as you — is not that strange?
BEATRICE:
As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I lov’d nothing so well as you, but believe me not; and yet I lie not. I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing.
— IV.i.267-272

4 “nothings”, one “thing.” They’re not talking about nothing.

O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!
— BEATRICE, IV.i.306-307

She would, too.

BENEDICK:
Come, bid me do any thing for thee.
BEATRICE:
Kill Claudio.
— IV.i.288-289

Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.—No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow and, which is more, an officer and, which is more, a householder and, which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to, and a rich fellow enough, go to, and a fellow that hath had losses, and one that hath two gowns and everything handsome about him.—Bring him away.—O, that I had been writ down an ass!
— DOGBERRY, IV.ii.76-87

Nathan Fillion’s performance of this ridiculous monologue, where the pretentious striver Dogberry cannot let it go that he was just called “an ass”.

If such a one will smile and stroke his beard,
Bid sorrow wag, cry “hem” when he should groan,
Patch grief with proverbs, make misfortune drunk
With candle-wasters, bring him yet to me,
And I of him will gather patience.
But there is no such man. For, brother, men
Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel, but tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion, which before
Would give preceptial med’cine to rage,
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
Charm ache with air and agony with words.
No, no, ’tis all men’s office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man’s virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself.
— LEONATO, V.i.15-31

Yet bend not all the harm upon yourself.
Make those that do offend you suffer too.
— ANTONIO, V.i,39-40

Good advice.

DON PEDRO:
Officer, what have these men done?
DOGBERRY:
Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
PRINCE:
First, I ask thee what they have done; thirdly, I ask thee what’s their offense; sixth and lastly, why they are committed; and, to conclude, what you lay to their charge.
— V.i.2123-223

Again, Nathan Fillion is hilarious in the role.

I cannot show it in rhyme. I have tried. I can find out no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”—an innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”—a hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”—a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.
— BENEDICK, V.ii.36-40

I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
— BEATRICE, V.ii.66

Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
— BENEDICK, V.ii.72

Story of my life.

The wolves have preyed, and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy cast with spots of grey.
— DON PEDRO, V.iii.25-27

Peace, I will stop your mouth.
— BENEDICK, V.iv.97

In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it. For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.
— BENEDICK, V.iv.104-109