Much Ado About Nothing is usually produced as a cheery romp, but it could equally be performed as a protest aganst gender hypocrisy and inequality.

Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare most popular and frequently performed comedies. Most productions take the title at face value, playing it as a cheerful romp, like Kenneth Branagh’s film version. However, a close look at the script of Much Ado About Nothing suggests much darker possibilities – it could be staged as a feminist critique of the hypocrisy of the genre roles in society.

Productions of Much Ado About Nothing tend to focus on the main characters, Beatrice and Benedick, as their humorous “skirmish of wit” is accessible for audiences used to modern rom-coms. However, a brief precis of Claudio and Hero’s love plot makes striking reading. The young soldier, returning from the war, sets out to win the hand of the girl he loves. After becoming engaged, he is tricked into believing that she has slept with another man. He waits for their wedding day, and denounces her in front of her friends and family, whilst her father wishes she were dead rather than alive and dishonouring him. It takes the girl’s faked death to make those concerned feel remorse. Not very cheery stuff, is it?

Benedick and Beatrice are part of this darker side to Much Ado About Nothing. When it is believed Hero has died after Claudio’s accusations, Beatrice interjects a chilling demand into their love banter:

Benedick: Come, bid me do any thing for thee.

Beatrice: Kill Claudio.

Torn between his new lover and his best friend from the army, Benedick seeks out Claudio and challenges him to fight, telling him “have killed a sweet lady, and her death shall fall heavy on you.”

At first glance, these parts of the plot can be explained away by two arguments. Firstly, pre-marital chastity was considered far more important in Shakespeare’s time than now – though we might find Claudio’s behaviour cruel and bizarre, we cannot apply our own standards to a play written four hundred years ago. Secondly, Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy, and these passages are not meant to threaten the happy outcome, they are simply the conventional intrigues which delay the final joyous wedding which solves everything.

Both these arguments overlook the strength of the language Shakespeare deploys n these plots, however. The railing against Hero’s “cunning sin” by her bridegroom and father, who call her “foul-tainted flesh” and “rotten orange” and hope that “Death is the fairest cover for her shame/ That may be wished for”, is too vicious to be simply forgotten in the reunion. Likewise, Beatrice’s repeated “O God, that I were a man” speeches, in which she wishes to become male that she might revenge Hero by access to the power and violence allowed men in her society. So much time is devoted to the strife in the middle of the play that it must have an effect on the audience’s feelings at the end. This vituperative rhetoric is as dramatic as anything else in Much Ado About Nothing: one of the most effective moments in the whole play is Beatrice’s “Kill Claudio”, which brings a sudden shiver even in the midst of Branagh’s good-humoured film.

Emphasizing the shadows of Much Ado About Nothing may not accord with Shakespeare’s “intentions”, or the world of Elizabethan comedy. It is strange, however, that the play should be produced regularly in front of enlightened modern audiences who accept blindly the hypocritical and misogynistic premises of the character’s actions. It would be extremely interesting to see a production of Much Ado About Nothing which used the original text to ironic feminist effect. After all, the title Mucho Ado About Nothing may signal a frothy comedy, or it may refer to the Elizabethan slang for the female sexual organs, “nothing”.

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