Nothingness and Noting (and wit)

Nothingness

* Much Ado About Nothing’: title of play suggests that it is not serious
* ‘Much Ado’ = business or activity
* Therefore ‘A lot of activity about Nothing’
* a storm in a teacup
* a montain made out of a molehill
* it all came to nothing
* ‘Nothing’ implies that the concerns of the play are trivial

Noting

* ‘Nothing’ was pronounced as ‘noting’ in Elizabethan England
* play on words
* could Shakespeare have meant something different?
* ‘Noting’ - to take of note
* The play is full of noting/ observing/ spying
* All of that eavesdropping, all of that overhearing, all of that spying at windows is taking note of things, and we get alerted to it

Eavesdropping

* Eavesdropping happens all the time in Shakespeare - it is a very useful dramatic device and he employs it in a lot of plays
* But most of the time, his eavesdropping bears out the idea that eavesdroppers will never hear good of themselves. However, what they will overhear is at least something that’s true
* But in Much Ado, almost everything that gets overheard is actually misinterpreted
* a lot of eavesdropping is because the play is set in Messina, a city in Sicily, and there is no privacy - everything that’s said is overheard
* Not only is there a lot of eavesdropping going on but there is a lot of misunderstanding about what is noted
* It is, in fact, wrongly noted and misunderstood

no-thing

* ‘thing’ was an Elizbethan euphemisim for a man’s genital part - a man’s ‘thing’
* ‘Nothing’ becomes a way of referring to female genitalia
* this play could be interpreted as a great deal of male fussing about female chastity
* The play is filled with images of adultery, often centering on the cuckhold’s horns and jokes about those
* and that, again, bings us back to a question, of who ‘knows’ what
* to have knowledge of someone is, in a legal sense, in a biblical sense, to have had sex with someone