In the past, occasionally a distinguished woman of the theater has taken on a male role—Sarah Bern hardt (1844-1923) as Hamlet is perhaps the most famous example—but such performances were widely regarded as eccentric. Although today there have been some performances involving cross-dressing (a drag As You Like It staged by the National Theatre in England in 1966 and in the United States in 1974 has achieved considerable fame in the annals of stage history), what is more interesting is the casting of women in roles that traditionally are male but that need not be. Thus, a 1993-94 English production of Henry V used a woman—not cross-dressed—in the role of the gov emor of Harfleur. According to Peter Holland, who reviewed the production in Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), “having a female Governor of Harfleur feminized the city and provided a direct response to the horrendous threat of rape and murder that Henry had offered, his language and her body in direct connection and opposition” (p. 210). Ten years from now the device may not play so effectively, but today it speaks to us. Shakespeare, born in the Elizabethan Age, has been dead nearly four hundred years, yet he is, as Ben Jonson said, “not of an age but for all time.” We must understand, however, that he is “for all time” precisely because each age finds in his abundance something for itself and something of itself.

And here we come back to two issues discussed earlier in this introduction—the instability of the text and, curiously, the Bacon/Oxford heresy concerning the authorship of the plays. Of course Shakespeare wrote the plays, and we should daily fall on our knees to thank him for them—and yet there is something to the idea that he is not their only author. Every editor, every director and actor, and every reader to some degree shapes them, too, for when we edit, direct, act, or read, we inevitably become Shakespeare’s collaborator and re-create the plays. The plays, one might say, are so cunningly contrived that they guide our responses, tell us how we ought to feel, and make a mark on us, but (for better or for worse) we also make a mark on them.

 

—SYLVAN BARNET
Tufts University

Introduction

Much Ado About Nothing presents an editor with no significant problems as to when it was written, the correctness of the text, the kind of source material that it reanimates and makes into a play. It was published in quarto in 1600, when Shakespeare was thirty-six, with his name on the title page, and was further identified as having been “publicly acted” by the acting company for which he wrote and of which he was a member. The evidence is quite clear that it had been written within a year or a year and a half of its publication (i.e., at about mid point in Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist). The text itself is an excellent one, the basis of the posthumous Folio text of 1623, with only a few minor difficulties as to the assignment of lines and as to the intent, here and there, of the original punctuation. The Hero-Claudio-Don John plot, with its lady’s maid, caught with her lover, being mistaken for the lady herself, has been traced back to a Greek source of about the year 400. The sixteenth-century Italian collector of tales, Bandello, used the plot in Story XXII of his Novelle (1554), as did Ariosto somewhat earlier in Book V of his Orlando Furioso,1 and as did Spenser in Book II, Canto 4, of the Faerie Queene (1590). Beatrice and Benedick, if one wishes to abstract them from the play to view them in historical context, are part of a battle of the sexes with deep roots in the culture and in the literature of the Western world (as I have tried to demonstrate in The Love-Game Comedy, 1946). Dogberry and Verges have self evident origins in that which they parody.

Much Ado, moreover, has never provoked elaborate critical appraisal, perhaps because it has always seemed serenely self-contained, a comedy that does its work so well when seen on a stage, or when read, that it does not particularly invite extended comment. Its brilliance as a comedy, then (to justify the admirable quietness of its critics), can be briefly verbalized in two interrelated ways. We can describe the dramatic strategies employed in the play, which create its idiosyncratic “tone” as a comedy. We can also try to define the unique identity of Much Ado by an exploration of its substance, the special aspect of existence blocked out for dramatization in the play.

The primary identifying fact about Much Ado, I think, is that it is the most realistic of Shakespeare’s love comedies written during the reign of Elizabeth. And it is realistic despite the basic improbability (or conventionality) of Claudio’s deception by Don John. It abandons completely the romantic landscape, the romantic disguisings, the romantic dialogue of Portia’s and Bassanio’s Belmont, of Rosalind’s and Orlando’s Forest of Arden, of Viola’s and Duke Orsino’s Illyria. In Much Ado we enter a dramatic world created in very close imitation of the habitable one we know outside the theater.

From its very beginning, the play forces this real world upon us. Its characters are a small group of aristocrats who have all known each other a long time and who are introduced to us, in 1.1, talking about each other on the basis of old familiarity. Hero, for example, recognizes at once Beatrice’s oblique reference to Benedick as “Signior Mountanto.” Beatrice, we are to understand, has taunted Benedick’s valor sometime before the immediate moments of the play and remembers that she has promised “to eat all of his killing” in the wars that have just concluded. She has also previously ridiculed his pretensions as a lover. She recalls: “He set up his bills here in Messina and challenged Cupid at the flight.” Leonato refers easily to the long-standing “merry war betwixt Signior Benedick” and Beatrice. Claudio confesses to earlier amorous thoughts about Hero before he went off to the “rougher task” of the wars. Even Don John (1.3) has already been sufficiently irritated by the “exquisite” Claudio to abhor the elegance of this “very forward March-chick,” this “start-up,” and to be “sick in displeasure to him” (2.2).

Our sense of the close approximation of Much Ado to an actual social world is further enhanced by a certain casualness and easiness in the confrontations of one character with another. In this respect, and scene by scene, Much Ado is more like Hamlet, for example, than it is like As You Like It or Twelfth Night. The first and the last scene in the play are perhaps the most brilliant illustrations of this casualness, this incredible ease with which characters react to each other.