What I’m Reading: Much Ado About Nothing

My daughter recently had to read Much Ado About Nothing in her ninth-grade English class-her first Shakespeare play! A little odd they didn’t read Romeo and Juliet. Isn’t that always the first Shakespeare kids read? Maybe that’s too sexy for kids today, I don’t know. Anyway, I’d never read Much Ado myself and decided to pick it up.

This isn’t an indie fantasy novel, where my review is likely to be the longest piece ever written on the book. Any Shakespeare play has had thousands of essays written about it, and any insights I may have will surely have been presented before and probably better. So, instead of a full review, I’ll simply give my impressions.

First of all, I’m not as familiar with Shakespeare’s comedies, but this one reminded me of the movie Airplane. Okay, bear with me here. In Airplane, there are tons of visual gags, puns, and comedic situations, and if one joke doesn’t land, it’s okay because there’s another coming in thirty seconds. Much Ado reminded me of that. You had sophisticated humor, in the veiled insults and educated barbs Beatrice and Benedick throw at each other every time they’re on the stage. You have physical comedy and dumb verbal humor when Dogberry and his city watch interact, especially with Dogberry’s non-stop malapropisms. And you have humorous situations created by the other characters as they overhear one another while hiding behind bushes and so forth, frequently misunderstanding what it is they heard. Shakespeare makes sure there’s a joke for everyone in the audience, and like Airplane, if you didn’t like the last one you don’t have to wait long for the next joke to show up.

Really, though, the whole play is one big misdirection. Ostensibly, it’s about the love between Hero and Claudio, and the obstacles thrown in the way of their wedding. But we know from the very first page they’re going to get together–look at the title itself, Much Ado About Nothing–even the play knows there’s no real drama in the situation of Hero and Claudio. Besides, they’re too nice and boring! Of course it will work out for them. Shakespeare doesn’t even bother to show us the betrayal scene that “complicates” the love between them. Why bother?

No, the real romance is between Beatrice and Benedick. When they’re not on stage, we can’t wait for them to appear again, because they’re funny and mean to each other and we don’t know if they’re going to get together. They don’t think they will, because they can’t even acknowledge that they like each other, yet when one isn’t present, the other can do nothing but talk and think about their counterpart. And because the focus is not on them, because the play on the surface is not really about them at all, their relationship is at real risk.

Why does Shakespeare do this? If the real interesting romance is the one between Beatrice and Benedick, why didn’t he make that the focus? I think it’s because Beatrice and Benedick are active. Hero and Claudio are passive–other people have to enable their romance. Don Pedro does this at the beginning, when he woos Hero on Claudio’s behalf and works things out with her father. The friar does this later, when he hatches his (ridiculous) plan to fake Hero’s death that Claudio might feel regret for his hasty decision rejecting her at the church. But really, they’re meant to be together, and the whole world will conspire to make that happen.

Beatrice and Benedick, on the other hand, have to activate their love with a project. So long as all they do is meet for dinner or dancing, and so forth, it will be insults and ignoring their true feelings. But when the love Hero and Claudio is threatened, and Beatrice demands Benedick get revenge for Hero’s humiliation, it takes what had been nascent and makes it grow.

And maybe that’s what Shakespeare is trying to tell the audience. If you have a storybook romance, that’s great, but most people will need to do more to get their love going. Maybe Shakespeare is showing us normal people, who after all, are basically secondary characters in the book of life, that we need projects, we need activity, we need working together to find love. A lucky few may be Hero and Claudio, but most of us are Beatrice and Benedick, and like them, we’re going to have to work at love just a little harder.