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.

King Lear - A Scene by Scene Walkthrough

Act I, Scene 1

The King of France is surprised and indignated at Lear's unexpected injustice to Cordelia. Lear has just approved of her rejection by the Duke of Burgundy and addressed France, warning him of her supposedly bad nature:

Amos Oz: Black Box

Love's debris & the irreversible of written speech

In his article on Black Box (in a superb English translation by Nicholas de Lange), published in New Statesman on the 1st of July 1988, Sean French expresses his surprise for the epistulary form of this novel; he also locates the inevitable problem of doubtful verisimilarity presented to a novelist by the application of this writing technique. In any case, the epistulary novel, especially when consisting of a letter exchange among individuals of different characters, mentality and origins, could always constitute a temptation to the writing skill of an author, as the heterogeneousness it entails makes it a first class exercise of style.