Much Ado About Nothing

by William Shakespeare

  Much Ado shares with Euripides’ Alcestis the idea of transformation being wrought by an image of the dead wife working on the mind. Alcestis expires on stage. Euripides gives a strong emphasis to her liminal position, both dead and not dead, no longer living but not yet received into the underworld. A gap is thus left open for recovery and return. When Herakles does return, it is with a veiled woman. Initially he says that it is a woman whom he has won; he asks Admetus to look after her while he goes off to perform his labor. Admetus says that he doesn’t want a woman in the house, especially one whose form is so like that of Alcestis. Herakles talks of a potential remarriage and the widower reacts angrily; there is a sense of his being tested and this time not failing. Eventually Admetus gives way to the strong will of Herakles and says he will take the woman into the house. The revelation and reunion then occur. It is a beautiful sequence, close in spirit and style to the reanimation of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. Strikingly, though, Alcestis does not speak. This motif is taken into the mythic structure when Herakles explains that she will not be allowed to speak for three days, by which time her obligations to the gods of the underworld will have been washed away. Alcestis functions as the archetypal silenced woman, and in this she is a precedent for the Hero who is allowed to say so little throughout the play and is given only two brief factual speeches on her unveiling at the climax. There are plenty of differences, not least in that there is no accusation of infidelity on Admetus’ part. Alcestis is not a direct source for the Hero plot; rather, it is a powerful mythic prototype for the silencing of the woman and its extension, her temporary consignment to the grave. As in All’s Well That Ends Well and The Winter’s Tale, the actual death of the myth is replaced by a self-conscious stage trick. Superhuman interventions like that of Herakles are replaced by domesticated divine agents: the Friar’s scheme in this play, Helen’s self-contrived devices in All’s Well, Paulina’s priestess-like art in The Winter’s Tale. Silence is not given a mythic-religious cause but becomes a psychological and social reality. But the strong sense of a second chance, of dying to live, draws the texts together.

  DOUBLE ENDING

  If we read Hero as an analogue for the female victims of Ovid’s Heroides, then Claudio is like one of the men in those poems: thoroughly untrustworthy and self-interested. This would accord with the bad press he’s always had: Charles Gildon at the beginning of the eighteenth century accused him of “barbarous” conduct toward Hero, A. C. Swinburne at the end of the nineteenth century called him “a pitiful fellow,” and most theatergoers today have little sympathy for him. But if, on the other hand, Hero is an Alcestis, Claudio is an Admetus who repents of and learns from his earlier unfair conduct. To accept the play as romance we have to go with this reading. The Friar’s plan has got to work: the mock death must make Claudio see Hero’s virtues, must make him into a nobler lover. We must therefore take seriously such lines in the final act as “I have drunk poison whiles he uttered it” and “Sweet Hero! Now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I loved it first.” And we must accept the sincerity of Claudio’s vow of an annual sackcloth visit to Hero’s monument. We must accept the magic of the reunion and, as in The Winter’s Tale, we must, in the Friar’s words, “let wonder seem familiar.”

  In an Elizabethan collection of romances called A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, which Shakespeare almost certainly read, the moral of the Admetus and Alcestis story is addressed to women readers: “you should die to yourselves and live to your husbands.” An old-fashioned plea for wifely submissiveness. But Shakespeare orders the matter differently: he retains the motif of the woman dying and then living again, but he does so in order that the husbands should die to themselves and live to their wives, for in Much Ado, as in The Winter’s Tale, it is the husband who must be transformed by loss in order that he may become worthy of his wife.

  As spectators we have been much more attracted to the witty lovers than the (supposedly) romantic ones. Since we cannot wait for the union of Benedick and Beatrice, we join Claudio in the rush toward it. Only on a second reading or viewing do we stop to worry about the kind of husband he will make for Hero. The question that matters to us is how on earth Beatrice and Benedick will stop insulting each other long enough to agree on a marriage contract. The answer comes from Leonato when he says “Peace! I will stop your mouth”—and forces the lovers into a kiss. We know that the wit-combat will resume, but for a moment at the end of the play we imagine the suspension of all quarrels in a kiss and then a dance. Technically, the Beatrice and Benedick story is a subplot that Shakespeare introduced into a romance story he inherited from Renaissance Italy; theatrically, they steal the show, and the benign plot whereby they are tricked into acknowledging their love for each other is the most memorable thing in the play. The simultaneously ardent and reluctant conjunction of “Signior Mountanto” and “Lady Disdain” helps us to forget about Claudio’s deficiencies. Small wonder that King Charles I wrote “Bennedike and Betrice” beneath the title of the play in his copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio and that in the nineteenth century Hector Berlioz dispensed with the other pair altogether in composing his opera Béatrice et Bénédict.

  Though Don Pedro facilitates Claudio’s desire for Hero, it is Beatrice who intrigues him. When he offers to repeat his matchmaking and get her a husband, for a moment he is half-serious in offering her himself. The exchange is one of the loveliest moments anywhere in Shakespearean comedy:

  BEATRICE Good lord, for alliance! Thus goes everyone to the

  world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit in a corner and cry

  “Hey-ho for a husband!”

  DON PEDRO Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.

  BEATRICE I would rather have one of your father’s getting.

  Hath your grace ne’er a brother like you? Your father got

  excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them.

  DON PEDRO Will you have me, lady?

  BEATRICE No, my lord, unless I might have another for

  working days: 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.

  DON PEDRO Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best

  becomes you, for out of question, you were born in a merry

  hour.

  BEATRICE No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there

  was a star danced, and under that was I born. Cousins, God

  give you joy!

  Beatrice bookends this encounter with references to the pair who have found love; her merriment in the interim masks a profound loneliness that Don Pedro himself retains at the end of the play. “Prince, thou art sad”: says Benedick, “get thee a wife, get thee a wife.” Everyone needs to join the dance of matrimony, he suggests—otherwise one will end up a despised exile like Don John. But the note of realism that comes from the grounded prose voice of the sparring partners is sounded one last time, in a lighthearted reference to cuckoldry that simultaneously reactivates and defuses the matter of infidelity that has created all the ado in the first place: “There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.” A truce has been called, but the merry and not so merry war between the sexes is always liable to resume. Its only armistice is that of death.

  ABOUT THE TEXT

  Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed t
o be generally understood, but now they can’t).

  But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half the sum of his plays appeared only posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.

  If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rush-light and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

  But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater-life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.

  Much Ado About Nothing is one of the plays where the Folio text was printed from the Quarto, though with some reference to a playhouse manuscript, which provided some additional stage directions. Most modern editors use the Quarto as their copy text but import stage directions, act divisions, and some corrections from Folio. Our Folio-led editorial practice follows the reverse procedure, using Folio as copy text, but deploying Quarto as a “control text” that offers assistance in the correction and identification of compositors’ errors. Differences are for the most part minor.

  The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

  Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Much Ado About Nothing, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “BENEDICK a lord from Padua”).

  Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. The whole of Much Ado is located in Messina, a city in northeast Sicily.

  Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

  Speakers’ Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

  Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and neither did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

  Spelling is modernized, but older forms are occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

  Punctuation in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semi-colons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought
. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a period (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

  Entrances and Exits are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[and Attendants]”). Exit is sometimes silently normalized to Exeunt and Manet anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

  Editorial Stage Directions such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are used only sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as directorial interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a different typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.