Studied by 6 people
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
