Nothingness and Noting (and wit)

‘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

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

‘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 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

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

‘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

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

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