Nothingness and Noting (and wit)

Nothingness

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