Much Ado About Nothing

The title of the play as related to the content

Apart from having universally been recognised as one of the most brilliant pieces of comedy ever written, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing can also be considered as a humorous yet quite accurate definition of the nature of dramatic art, answering with their own weapons to his contemporaries who condemned the theatre considering it as "nothing" because it highlighted spectacle and artificiality against substance and meaning. From beginning to end, the plot of the play is "much ado about nothing", as every character makes too much fuss, or too much ado, about forged facts and testimonies of misled witnesses. An entire theatrical intrigue is therefore introduced within the given, conventional scheme conformable to the very nature of the comic piece, a multiple game of observation and eavesdropping ("noting"), based on false impressions and deformed appearences, in other words on nothing. Moreover, the phonetic relationship between the words "nothing" and "noting" (taking into consideration the fact that "nothing" was pronounced "noting" by the Elisabethans) is here inevitable to remark. The "noting" taking place on stage has, in a further interpretation, nothing as a reasonable counterpoise, it is vacant and meaningless, like a mask which is lifted to reveal no face underneath.

The play itself is a piece of noting where the comic irony is exploited to the most of its possibilities. A perfect complicity is in this way established between the viewer or reader and the play: from the first indication of "noting" in Act I Scene 3, where Boracchio confides to Don John his eavesdropping of Claudio's intention to marry Hero, up to the final scene, a constant interchange of roles, a hide-and-seek of luminosity and darkness, of truth and deception, honesty and dishonesty occurs before the audience's very eyes, on plain stage. The viewer is thus informed of every intention or move, becomes aware of the obscurest details of the plot and the minor intrigues it consists of. The various misunderstandings taking place within the logic of the play, which are anyway the absolutely necessary agents of the intrigue, are clear to the audience and even expected. The internal noting is in its turn noted by the viewers; as it has been suggested, "relationship between audience and play, spectator and spectacle, is self-consciously drawn attention to". The quintescense of artistic creation, that is its distanciation from the human receiver of any of its messages, the complete autonomy of a work of art as such, is here achieved in the most effective way, as the theatricality of the play is absolutely obvious to the audience.

Considering, on the other hand, the fact that the word "nothing" had, at the time, a sexual connotation referring to the female organs of reproduction, the title could also indicate the fact that in the play there is too much fuss made about the heroine Hero's physical and moral integrity. lt could even constitute a promise of "dirty" jokes to the audience: it has been suggested that the title of Much Ado can be seen "both as a dirty joke and a complicated philosophical riddle". The question of Hero's chastity is indeed what feeds and animates the action and attributes an almost tragic tonality to the dramatic facts from Act IV Scene 1 onwards. The fatal consequences of her denunciation by Claudio, though themselves forged, are so gravely and verisimilarly acted out by her supporters that the negative notion of "too much ado" over her supposed impurity comes to be more or less justified.

Apart from this matter, much ado is yet made by Beatrice and Benedick about their initial resolution to remain unmarried and end their lives in a continual "merry war" of wits and nerves against each other. That is to say about nothing, since they finally not only renounce to their merry war but also fall in love with each other and marry like everyone else, to live happily ever after. Much ado is also made in Act I Scene 1 about Claudio's admirable heroism in the battlefield, which is in some way incompatible with the image of a na'ive, rather conventional character he presents on stage. Much ado is equally and in a delightfully comical way made by Dogberry in Act IV Scene 2, over the crucial fact that he has been called an ass by Conrade. As for the slanders of Don John and his faithful assistants against Hero, one might use, to characterise them, the words of Macbeth from Shakespeare's homonymous play, Act V Scene 5: "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

In this very scene of Macbeth, Shakespeare gives a negatively biased definition of dramatic reality: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more". The insubstantiality of theatrical facts nevertheless becomes void as soon as its limitations are exhibited. Illusion, "nothing" is revealed to be not subverted, as one would have expected, but confirmed. No transparent opposition between appearence and reality is offered; what is suggested is but a "distinction between honest and dishonest slanders, honest and dishonest illusions". Even the final scene, where the happy conclusion makes up for all the "much ado about nothing", highlights in fact the victory of "nothing" over the "much ado". Far from contributing to a reasonable separation of illusion from reality, the finale actually celebrates "the triumph of illusion over reality".