Much Ado About Nothing

by William Shakespeare

  Admittedly, Claudio in Act 5 seems to revert (at least with Benedick) to the locker room. But in nearly all of his romantic comedies, Shakespeare insists on the possibility of repentance and forgiveness. He thinks people can change. He’s realistic about how hard it is, but he believes in a second chance. We’re less inclined to, nowadays. Our loss.

  If you were to direct the play again, would you consider following the early Quarto and Folio texts—and this edition—and giving the line “Peace! I will stop your mouth” (5.4.101) to Leonato, rather than assigning it to Benedick, as most productions have done? How might that alter this moment of resolution?

  Elliott: When we rehearsed it, we were constantly chopping and changing between the different versions. If I did it again? Difficult to say, as I don’t know what kind of production that would be. But I love that moment. I wanted to show they were genuinely in love and quips wouldn’t serve them anymore. Benedick is stopping Beatrice gabbing away again at her usual game of verbal wit by just cutting it short with a kiss. At last! The resolution is one of love.

  When you direct a play it becomes very personal. It’s hard to explain how. It’s not just personal to you, it’s personal to everybody involved in the rehearsal room: the creative team and the actors. If I did it again I would probably, at that time of my life, be interested in different things, as I’m sure everyone else in the room would be, so we would do it with a slightly different slant. At the time I really wanted to explore the character of Beatrice, and who she was. I was fascinated by Benedick too, but really very interested in Beatrice; in the way she lived within the world, as described above, but still with a sense of her own individuality. And given that she had to fight to be so different to everyone else, how does she fall in love? And with whom? And what does that do to change her? And if it changes her, how does that change the world around her? And what does it mean anyway that the world changes? That’s what I wanted to explore. Maybe if I did it again I’d be much more interested in Benedick, or the fact that Benedick and Beatrice were much older and perhaps felt they were past it, and then re-found their sexiness and allure—which Nick Hytner’s production portrayed so brilliantly. I’d be interested in other things. That’s why theater is so alive, isn’t it? It’s ephemeral, of the moment. Productions shouldn’t be compared. They are their own entities, produced by a particular group of people, at a particular time in history, who relate to the material as products of their time and place.

  Hytner: I would consider it briefly and decide that we were right first time. There are all sorts of reasons to give the line to Leonato that look good in the study. Leonato has spent the play trying (often ineffectually) to exert control—particularly over Beatrice. By silencing Beatrice, Benedick might be in danger of coming across as a crypto-Petruchio—better to leave Leonato with the line and allow them to end the play in perfect equality. And so on.

  But in the theater, it’s blindingly obvious that the line is Benedick’s and that the Quarto compositor got it wrong. It’s about a kiss. It’s about a marriage. It’s about a man and a woman. That old thing. Therefore play, music.

  HARRIET WALTER ON PLAYING BEATRICE

  Harriet Walter was born in 1950 and trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Her early experience included work with the Joint Stock touring theater company, Paines Plough touring company, and the Dukes playhouse, Lancaster. She has worked with the RSC many times during her career and was made an associate artist in 1987. She has numerous television and film roles to her credit, including DI Natalie Chandler in Law and Order: UK, Sense and Sensibility, and Atonement. Apart from Beatrice in Gregory Doran’s successful 2002 production of Much Ado About Nothing, she has played Helena in Trevor Nunn’s 1981 production of All’s Well That Ends Well and Imogen in Bill Alexander’s 1987 production of Cymbeline at The Other Place, as well as Lady Macbeth in Doran’s 1999 production of Macbeth, chronicling the experience in her book Macbeth in Faber and Faber’s “Actors on Shakespeare” series, and a much-acclaimed Cleopatra in his 2006 production of Antony and Cleopatra.

  There is clearly a history between Beatrice and Benedick that has taken place before the play starts. Is that something you explored in rehearsal?

  We certainly discussed this, yes. We found quite a few possible scenarios, but the most helpful thought was that at some point in the past when they were letting their guard down and verging on a loving relationship, there had been a misunderstanding whereby Beatrice and Benedick had each interpreted the other as having rejected them. Both pretend to the world and to themselves that they were the dumper, not the dumpee. Both are too proud to admit their pain, so they revert to raillery and public scorn or teasing.

  This “performance” not only acts as a much-needed shield to protect each of their egos, but it also becomes so publicly entertaining that they feel obliged to please the crowd and keep it up. They are trapped by the success of their posturing into a habit of mutual dislike. Everyone expects it of them and they have got to a point where each privately expects it of him/herself.

  It is doubtful that Benedick ever got so far as to consciously think he was ever in love with Beatrice, while Beatrice, who is a little more in touch with her heart, probably did admit to loving Benedick, though by the beginning of the play this has long since been converted to strong dislike. Her comment “I know you of old” was interesting to play with an awareness of hurt inside. She skates near the edge, teasing her audience with hints. For example, in Act 2 Scene 1:

  DON PEDRO: Come, lady, come, you have lost the heart of Signior

  Benedick.

  BEATRICE: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him

  use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before

  he won it of me with false dice, therefore your Grace may well

  say I have lost it.

  It felt to me as though she both wanted to be found out, and was, at the same time, absolutely loath to be found out. Her jokes are a brilliant mask and also a trap.

  It takes the two eavesdropping scenes to reveal Beatrice and Benedick’s true feelings to themselves. It is their private shock (and relief in a way) on discovering they love deep down, the bit they “privately” confess to the audience, that is moving and funny. It is also important, for all the actors involved in those duping scenes in the garden, to remember that each group thinks they are tricking each of the lovers into believing a lie that the other is in love with them, and neither group realizes till much later that they have in fact revealed the truth.

  8. Harriet Walter as Beatrice in Gregory Doran’s Sicilian Much Ado for the RSC in 2002.

  Did you find there were some key shifts in the balance of power between them? The “Kill Claudio” moment’s a crucial one, isn’t it?

  I think both Beatrice and Benedick are sticklers for equality, which is what makes their relationship at the end so sympathetic to a modern audience. The Hero–Claudio plot takes over so quickly after Beatrice and Benedick discover their love for one another that Shakespeare denies the latter couple the happy payoff scene, or at least he postpones it until Act 5 Scene 2. Instead they have to admit their love in the urgent and stressed circumstances of Hero’s humiliation at the wedding. Just as Beatrice was beginning to unfurl and put her trust in Benedick, she is reminded of all that she mistrusts about the male species. There is Claudio willing to believe so quickly that his betrothed has been sleeping with another man, and Hero’s own father is shockingly quick to believe hearsay above a lifetime’s knowledge of his daughter. Both men love their own honor better than they ever love Hero. This is the Sicilian climate of macho honor, of omertà.

  By setting the play in a recognizable Sicily and stressing this male code so strongly, [director] Gregory Doran helped me enormously. It justified Beatrice’s defensive bloody-mindedness. It comes from a deep place of fear, however humorously expressed. In such a culture, the bonds between men are stronger than any bond between a man and a woman, and while women w
ill bond together in mutual protection against this fact, once they marry they are expected to switch their primary loyalty to their man and children. For a mature marriage to work, a man must prove himself capable of doing the same and leaving his boyish comrades behind. This is essentially what Beatrice is demanding of Benedick when she says “Kill Claudio.” I believe it is not so much that she wants to see Claudio dead, as that she wants proof that Benedick is capable of rejecting and criticizing this worst aspect of male behavior. She needs to know that he can distance himself from his past allegiances and truly commit to her.

  The Hero–Claudio story line is often overshadowed by the Beatrice–Benedick one, isn’t it? Berlioz left it out of his operatic version altogether! Did you find ways of helping your director to keep it whole, to give due weight to the “romantic” lovers? Especially tough with Hero, maybe, since she has so few lines?

  The distinctive and very modern aspect of the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is that from the moment they admit their love to one another they are free to respect one another’s strength of character. In each of them, submitting to love was linked with an idea of loss of power and control. But having had such a long drawn-out and often antagonistic courtship, they can be said to really know one another and to have seen the worst of one another. This is very different from the untested and idealistic love between Claudio and Hero, who have really only fallen in love with one another’s image and social suitability. Shakespeare deliberately contrasts these two types of relationship and each plot elucidates the other.

  Was it a particular pleasure to play the women-only scenes?

  This is an interesting question. In fact the women-only scenes are quite difficult to find the tone for. Aside from a general ease of atmosphere, the plotting is less obviously funny than in the all-male scenes. Dare I wonder whether it has something to do with Shakespeare himself not quite knowing what women get up to or talk about when men aren’t around? Aside from the delightful scene between Katherine and Alice in Henry V, most of Shakespeare’s successful all-female scenes either have a girl posing as a boy, as in Twelfth Night, or they are between a wiser older woman and a younger (Othello, All’s Well). All-girlie scenes are harder for him to write and therefore harder to play. Having said that, it was very noticeable that the hierarchy changes distinctly in Hero’s household when there are no men about. Hero becomes the dominant female. She has the highest social status and the actress gets a chance to play a sparky character, very different from the subdued trophy bride and favorite daughter she is forced to play in public.

  Seventy percent prose and only 30 percent verse: unusual proportions for Shakespeare. Did that make a difference to your language work on this play?

  Yes. Beatrice only speaks in verse at the end of Act 3 Scene 1. It is also her only soliloquy. I therefore took it that this was a moment to reveal her deepest feelings and romantic aspirations—things she wouldn’t dream of revealing to anyone “inside” the play. As actors we are always asked to note where the language changes from verse to prose or to rhyming. There are no hard-and-fast rules as to what Shakespeare means by these changes, but if an actor observes them, a kind of reason is revealed inside us via the different rhythms and notes that are sounded in our subconscious. We note the changes and try and justify or explain them later. It is better that way round.

  Hero’s return: a neat trick for which we’re well prepared, and yet isn’t there some element of magical resurrection about it—one thinks back to the Alcestis of Euripides and forward to the revival of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale? The problem, though, is Claudio’s rather grudging participation?

  Yes. In each of these cases what is required is a solemnity, an almost religious ritual to match the scale of the conversion of the wrongdoer and to earn the audience’s forgiveness. In our production, Gregory Doran recognized that Claudio’s rehabilitation can seem very glib and speedy, and wanted to make his contrition at Hero’s supposed graveside as true and as heartfelt as possible. He gave the scene more time and gravity than usual, and Claudio’s grief was played (by John Hopkins) with moving sincerity. Despite these best efforts, I think the play leaves us all with a big worry for the future of Claudio and Hero’s partnership, in contrast to our pleasure in the coming together of the less romantic, less deluded Beatrice and Benedick.

  If you were to play the part again, how would you feel if the director followed the early Quarto and Folio texts—and this edition—and gave the line “Peace! I will stop your mouth” (5.4.101) to Leonato, rather than assigning it to Benedick, as most productions have done? If Leonato more or less forces Benedick to stop Beatrice’s mouth with a kiss, how might that alter the moment of resolution? Might it get round the problem you have when Benedick speaks the line, whereby Beatrice is effectively, if only momentarily, suffocated with the kiss (something that seems more Othello than Much Ado)?

  I am convinced that it is better to give the line to Benedick, and I don’t find it is a sinister suffocation at all. Rather, it seems to be a restoration of their usual banter but with love behind it now. Their power struggles are over. Beatrice no longer feels the need to have the last word. They have a wonderful confidence in one another. It is playable the other way, of course, but is not so dramatically compact or eloquent. I am glad most productions have disobeyed the early Quarto and Folio texts.

  What interesting connections and contrasts did you discover in the process of playing this Shakespearean lead, as opposed to others such as Innogen in Cymbeline, Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well, and Cleopatra or even Lady Macbeth?

  I have a tendency to seek dissimilarities rather than similarities between the characters I have played, so I haven’t given much thought to the links. The most obvious thing that springs to mind in retrospect is that Beatrice does not drive the plot to the extent of Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra or Innogen or Helena. This is partly to do with her position in the household as a sort of poor relation, and partly because she reveals herself through a lot of prose banter rather than arias of great poetry. The great soliloquies give an actor a special sort of command of the stage and of the audience. Beatrice, as befits her place in the community, has to win her points through wit, through ducking and diving and dancing and then, when Benedick offers her first taste of unfettered power—“Come, bid me do anything for thee”—she surprises everyone (including herself) with the depth of passion she feels: “Kill Claudio.” Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth would probably have been instantly obeyed. Beatrice gets a greater reward than obedience. Benedick goes as far as his integrity will allow and challenges Claudio to a duel. The play, being a comedy, lets us all off the hook, but Beatrice has found an ally who loves her but is still his own man. Perfect.

  SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER

  IN THE THEATER

  BEGINNINGS

  William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

  Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the p
attern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

  Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university- educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

  He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.