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

Major and minor nothings

Moments:

• Claudio denounces Hero on the basis of a ‘nothing’ - a misconception, an evil trick

“No”

“Give not this rotten orange to your friend”

• Beatrice and Benedick fall in love based on a ‘nothing’ - a trick played in kindness

  • the “merry war” of wit between Beatrice and Benedick, which has lots of heat, but not very much light

  • in the end turns out to be just another slower form of courtship

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

Moments

• Claudio noting Hero

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

Moments:

• Benedick and Beatrice both eavesdrop in the garden

• Claudio and Don Pedro spy on what they believe is Hero at the window

• The watch hear Barachio brag about his part in the plot to denounce Hero

Buisness

• noting also means this buisness of making musical notes

• there is another whole kind of pun here

  • Elizabethans quite often didn’t write notes with ink, but they used to prick them into parchment using a pin

    • so you would have a little series of holes indicating notes

    • this led them to coin the term ‘prick song’

      • this term has lent itself to rude puns down the years

      • it gives rise to a certain amount of rude dialogue

      • connects very interestingly with the third meaning of nothing, which is no - thing

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

Wit

This question of knowing becomes absolutely critical - who knows what? Who knows whom? Who has noted what?

• and a word that connects all of those things is ‘wit’ and its cognate

  • ‘wit’ comes from the Old English ‘witan’, which means ‘to know’

  • and to be witty is to be knowing

• ‘witness’, ‘wittingly’, ‘unwitting’, ‘witless’ and ‘witlessly’ are all cognates of ‘wit’

  • we have a “merry war” of wit betwwen Beatrice and Benedick, who also know things

  • when Claudio denounces Hero, the issue of wittingness and of witness is everywhere

    • In Shakspeare’s time, you had to bear witness for the community to the marriage

    • A large part of Claudio’s fault is that he chooses to make his accusation public

      • he chooses to make it a pblic denunciation to proclaim to the world, to let the world know that Hero has been (he thinks) unchaste

      • that is the question of whom she has ‘known’ in that biblical sense

  • that accusation comes ultimately from Don John

    • the bastard, who, in himself, embodies an improper ‘knowing’

    • otherwise, he would not be a bastard - he would be a ligeitimate child