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

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

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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

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