So today, I'm talking about much ado about nothing. So much ado about nothing was written in fifteen ninety eight to nine. I'm first published in sixteen hundred. I'm going to talk a little bit about that first quarter publication in sixteen hundred. Then of course it's included in the Folio in sixteen twenty three. As you almost certainly know, it's a romantic comedy with two pairs of lovers. The rebarbative and reluctant Beatrice and Benedick and disappear more conventional hero.
And Claudio, the play's villain, Don John attempts to interrupt the courtship of heroine Claudio and almost brings about disaster. His machinations, however, are foiled by some unlikely comedy watchmen to bring about the play's happy ending. And the question I want to use to focus the discussion of the play today is why does everyone believe Don Jon? So let me just start with some analysis of what Don John does in this play.
He enters in Act one, scene one where his stage direction is uncompromisingly John the bastard. We'll come back to the bastard bit later. He's silent throughout that scene until he is welcomed by Leonardo, to which he replies simply, I thank you. I am not have many words, but I thank you. Leonardo suggests that there has been bad blood between Don Jon and his legitimate brother Don Pedro, but that they are now reconciled to scenes.
Later, we see Don Jon in full villainous mode, alone with his companions, his kind of henchmen, again, defined by kind of saturnine melancholy, claiming his sadness is without limit. Don Jon, interestingly, commits himself to a radical policy of self disclosure, very much in contrast to Shakespearean characters who say they are not what they are or they are not what they seem.
I'll talk a bit more about that later. Jon. Don. Jon instead. So instead says that he is incapable of looking like something he isn't. He's incapable of dissimulation. I cannot hide what I am completely different from all those characters who tell us all the time that they are hiding what they are, either because they are in disguise or because their inner self and as in Hamlet, can't be can't be expressed.
I cannot hide what I am, says Don Jon. I must be sad when I have cause and smile at No Man's Jest. So he's a curious kind of villain, that's to say, since he's characterised by disclosure rather than by concealment. I am a plain dealing villain. He tells his henchmen. Conrad. So news arrives to Don John that Claudio described as Don Pedro's right hand is to be married. Don John sees that this may prove food to my displeasure that young up.
He says it's a great phrase for clothing. The Young Start-Up that Young Start-Up has all the glory of my overthrow. If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way. Kind of echo Shylock. There in a way, I think more perhaps about what comic villains do in these plays in a minute. That Young Start-Up has all the glory of my overthrow. If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way.
Now, what's interesting to me about that is it establishes Don Jon's behaviour within a network of rivalrous male relationships. And that's going to be an important theme that I'm trying to think about in this lecture. I think, in fact, this is a whole play structured by male relationships, even as romantic comedy in the genre of romantic comedy encourages us to think that it's about men and women. Don Pedro has told Claudia that he will woo hero on his behalf.
Part of the play's notable pattern of substituting male male relationships for male female ones. And we see that the wooing of hero. It's a negotiation between Claudio, Don Pedro and Leon Ahto hero herself. Barely figures and barely speaks. So it's the marriage of Claudio and Hero is seen in the play as the key to securing this network of male relationships.
The relationship between Claudia, Don, Pedro Antley and AHTO so to undoing that relationship is also figured as the assertion of masculine bonds. At the ball, Don John pretends he thinks the mascot, Claudio, is, in fact Benedek, the whole of the masked ball is about people who are in disguise thinking they are impenetrably in disguise. And people who are looking at them, seeing immediately who they are.
And it's a very odd, kind of very odd sense of disguise that the people who are in disguise think nobody knows who I am. And everybody else, NCAA, your band at your club gets it done. It is absolutely clear who who is talking to just so as to Beatrice is and marketers in that same scene. So he pretends he thinks that the masked Claudio is, in fact Benedek and pretends to him in that pretence that Don Pedro is really wooing here for himself.
As you can see, it's a fiendishly clever device. Don Jon is a real criminal mastermind here. Claudia's response is extremely reliable. He immediately believes that this must be true to certain. So the prints wus for himself. But he follows this quickly with the reassuring certainty that this doesn't mean that Don Pedro has behaved badly. No, not at all. Beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melts into blood. Beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melts into blood.
It's already, that's to say Hiro's fault. Now, this particular piece of misinformation is quickly delivered and quickly cleared up. But Don Jon is not defeated. Any impediment to him, to Claudio will be medicinal to me. He says. So next time around, the proposed impediment to here, Claudio's marriage is more sophisticated. Although actually it can't be said to come from Don John himself.
The plot is outlined to him by his servant, Braccio, who has an understanding of some sort with Margaret Heroes' gentlewoman. It's a simple plot. Don John will bring Claudio. I'm Don Pedro. To see a kind of dumb show at Hero's Window in which she is apparently in an assignation with a secret lover. Don, Jon tells Claudia that his lady is disloyal. Promises to show him the proof. And both Claudio and Don Pedro agree that they will go to see this terrible faithlessness enacted.
If I see anything tonight, why I should not marry her, vows Claudio tomorrow in the congregation where I should wed there. Will I shame her? Don Pedro agrees. The relationship, of course, between Clodagh Claudio and Hero is in fact really a relationship between Claudio and Don Pedro. And as I wooed for the to obtain her, I will join with the to disgrace her. There is not any whisper of suspicion about why Don Johnson should children should so troubled himself to reveal something to help Claudio.
Don Pedro, nor does anybody recall anything about the past which might lead them to think that Don John's motives are not entirely helpful, even though the play still calls him bastard and identity, which has clear ethical connotations in this period. As we can see from Edmund in King Lear, the characters seem entirely to forgotten this legible marker of what he is like. That may be something to do with the way the text works.
So I already said that when Don John comes in right in the first act of the play, he's called Bastard in the stage direction, but he hasn't called. He isn't identified as illegitimate in the speeches of the play, in the words of the play until Act four. Maybe a difference between what we expect in in in reading perhaps, and and what's made clear to us on the stage.
So you can see why the question around which I wanted the lecture to focus arises, given that Don Jon scarcely troubles to hide, that he is malevolent, given that he bears the useful shorthand bastard as part of his name throughout the play. And given that his first attempt to prevent Claudio's marriage fails, why do Claudio and Don Pedro believe him so implicitly? Let's step back for a minute from this potential psychology of that question.
We'll come back to that to think a bit more generically. The Roman new comedy on which Shakespeare often bases his own comic drama has, as we've discussed before in these lectures. A prominent role for a blocking figure, an anti comic figure, somebody who is interrupting comic progress, usually a patriarch or a similar role, someone who does not want the young couple to get married.
We can see, for example, how this might operate in Midsummer Night's Dream or in two gentlemen of Verona or in the Merchant of Venice, in all these plots, the circumvention of a father figure who doesn't want the marriage to go ahead is a significant part of the plot. In much ado about nothing, that blocking figure is displaced. Leonardo, the patriarch, could not be happier that his daughter is to be married off to Claudia.
It's part of the way in which is actually a rather ineffectual figure in the play that he can't even take on the role that the comedy ought to give him. Someone who is slowing down courtship or saying, just a minute, let's let's let's wait and see or I don't approve or taking up that blocking role. Well, that leaves a gap for blocking a gap for the figure who is blocking and Don John takes up that gap. He fills up the space with a kind of lateral blocking figure.
And I think it's done johns rivalries with other men that form the ultimate challenge to the plots heterosexual conclusion. And so more about that we might observe, though, in passing that much ado about nothing is probably the first of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's comic plays were a crucial blocking element is actually psychological rather than circumstantial. Nothing and no one is stopping Beatrice and Benedick from getting together.
In fact, quite the opposite. The play is a kind of anti blocking and it's trying to bring them together. The obstacle that needs to be overcome in that case is an internal rather than an external one. It's something to do with that character's. So Don, John takes up the blocking roll, and that suggests that he is believed because the play needs a blocking figure,
otherwise marriages happen too quickly. We've discussed before in other players delay and deferral interruption, unnecessary to plotting. Otherwise, things think things aren't spread out across five acts. Partly, it's Don John's function to provide that delay. So if blocking figures, a conventional parts of comic structure, Shakespeare gives Don John a role rather different from that he found in his sources.
The tale of the slandered but virtuous woman is a popular trope in early modern literature. But plots that maybe, maybe influenced Shakespearean writing much ado about nothing. Plots from area Stow's or Orlando Furioso and the English translations and spinoffs of that plot all tend to suggest that at the core of this deception plot is a male jealousy over women. To put it another way, what the sources show us is a Don John figure rejected by hero who therefore seeks to destroy her reputation.
So, Don, Jon's motivation is sexual jealousy. If he is not going to have her, he is going to spoil her reputation, unspoiled her for her chosen lover. Now, Shakespeare enjoys these plots of male rivalry over women. We see almost the same plot in two gentlemen of Verona and in two noble kinsmen. And in fact, you know, clearly the titles of those plays suggest that that male rivalry is is the crucial dynamic in them.
But he isn't giving us one of those plots here. We don't get male rivalry over a single woman. A much ado about nothing, as we did in the sources. George Bernard Shaw called Don John a true natural villain, having no motive in this world except sheer love of evil, having no motive in this world except sheer love of evil. Anticipating, therefore, Jago or perhaps more precisely, recalling Coleridge, his famous description of Jago as motiveless malignity.
But I actually think the motive in danger in Don John's case is not, in fact, entirely absent. Don Jon gives us a plot in which the rival object of desire is not female, but male. It is Claudio or through him, Don Pedro, the Don John wants to harm. It is male bonds that he seeks, perversely, to affirm. Hero is of no interest to him whatsoever.
She is the means, not the object. Now, I don't mean by stressing this to suggest a particular issue about sexuality in this play, although I do think Shakespeare is deeply interested in issues of homoeroticism and we could argue about that in relation to much ado about nothing. But there are problems with this kind of line of argument.
The questions which are often asked about Don Johns more effective Avatar Jago, which put villainy and sexuality together, which tried to explain the Argo's motives because of some aspect of same sex desire. These are troubling ideologically, aren't they? Because they say that how you explain pathological villainy is to say that it's somehow homosexual in nature. So you've made an ideological gain by saying, look, there were gay people in Shakespeare's plays.
That is again. But if you say, look, they were terribly bad, criminal, psychopathic gay people in Shakespeare's plays, in some ways you haven't ideologically made the game that you might have thought. A bit of an own goal. So I think a homosocial bonds in this play. Homosocial bonds. OK, so bonds, which are about a primary effective attachment between men, not necessarily what we would see as homosexuality is what's being repeatedly invoked.
And it's these homosocial bonds that conspire to produce the plays real blocking structure. I think, Don, Jon's behaviour, therefore, is thus explicitly related to the play's wider depiction of male relationships and the threat these posed to comic resolution in marriage. All of Shakespeare's comedies dramatise the developmental movement by which young people forgo primary attachments to their own sex in favour of a romantic attachment to an opposite sex partner.
Because romantic comedies on the early modern stage are directed towards the education of men. It's interesting that for us, rom com is a is a kind of entirely samini genre. But really on the Elizabethan stage, it must have been largely directed at men. The number of women who went to the theatre in that period is really quite so far as we know, quite small. Shakespeare's writing these plays for a predominantly male audience and therefore its male relationships.
The necessity of breaking male relationships is particularly dramatised. That's what's happening in the last scene of Merchant of Venice, in which Portia makes Pisania squirm about just what happened to his wedding ring. She's she's tussling with implicitly with Antonio over where the Sonia's main main allegiance lies.
This toggling between male friendship and marriage is the main theme, as I've already said, of two gentlemen and two noble kinsmen, and it's one way, as I suggested in my lecture on Twelfth Night, of thinking about the relationship between Viler Senario and Orsino, why that never fully sorts itself out or straightens out in the end, why violence never comes back in female clothes while Seno never calls her viler and so on.
That might suggest that uniquely in Shakespeare's comedies or Seno does not have to choose between a female lover and a male best friend since DeSario Viler provides both. But nowhere in the plays, I think, is the drama of the male male to male female transition more explicitly pointed than in much ado. After spending more than half the play flirting and bantering while arguing that they cannot stand each other.
Beatrice and Benedick finally acknowledged their feelings together as they are alone in the shock of heroes broken nuptials. I protest. I love the, says Benedek. I was about to protest. I loved you, replies Beatrice. Just as each one makes themselves vulnerable to the other. That comes immediately a terrible choice. Come bid me do anything for the office. Benedek. In the heady expansiveness of acknowledged love, Beatrice's reply is deadly kill Claudia.
To be sure, the plot has made this explicable. It's just shown why Claudio's behaviour is such that Beatrice might want Benedict to kill him. But we could actually try and reverse the causal relationship. The plot here is the vehicle for making Benedek break with Claudia. That's the most important thing rather than the other way around. To be with Beatrice means killing Claudia.
Benedicts realisation and reluctant acceptance of this is sharp, but is not unprecedented in the play, that romance and marriage signal an end to certain sorts of male relationship. It's part of the wistfulness of the play from the beginning. The military camaraderie outside of the play is replaced within it by the merry war of words between Beatrice and Benedick. Violent plots and ambushes. A recast in the play's comic.
Repeated tropes of overhearing and overseeing. In the final episode of the long-running television romantic comedy Friends, The Establishment of heterosexual coupledom, which will bring narrative closure. Finally, after all, the series is simultaneously seen to cut out same sex friendships, their losses symbolised by an extended sequence in the final episode in which the table football, which has been such a prominent feature of the guy's apartment. Did none of you ever watch E4?
It's on all the time. Still is is being dismantled. It's a symbol of the kind of a male, a male world of male bonding period being over. It's a sad as a kind of poignant moment. Something similar happens in much ado, although not with the type of football. From the beginning of the play. Problems emerge amongst the men as they shift their interest from masculine friendship to romance. We have seen how under provocation from Don John Claudia suspects that Don Pedro is wielding Hero himself.
Benedek bemoans Claudio's Munish preference for the effeminate Tabor and pipe and his new doublet over drum and fife and good armour. This is a clearly a distinction between the feminised interests and feminised peaceful pursuits that Claudia the lover, likes, as opposed to Claudia. The soldier. Shakespeare will return to this theme, the theme of broken, a powerful but broken male friendships and how they articulate against relationships with women in another play set.
Like Much Ado in Sicily, which shares many themes with Much Ado, The Winter's Tale. Powerful male friendship between Lelantos and Polixeni is again seemed to be ruptured by the intrusion of the female like hero. That's to say my name may be the means to express jealousy as a relationship between men rather than a relationship between men and women. Now, I've talked before about the way the teleology of Shakespeare's plays is sometimes under invested in their conclusions.
The players don't want to get to the end. They know that if they're negotiating with an ending, which is a closing down or a kind of compromise of the issues and the drama, that the play has mobilised endings, often registering Shakespeare, something of that sadness that Frank Kermode sees as the sense of an ending intrinsic to narrative structure.
I think how much do we might see a slightly modified structure in which the romantic comedy plot ending the ending in marriage is placed under sustained threat by the play's ongoing commitment to male bonding? What prevents the lovers from being together or what attempts to prevent that is a strongly fought preference for male company and for male society that the play liked on John himself cannot quite let go of. Male bonding retains a perverse hold over the men of the play.
It offers them a last excuse not to get married. It must be significant that Don John intervenes the night before. Claudio is due to get married. It's the very last moment, really, when that kind of intervention might work. So this must be, I think, why Don John is believed. Like Othello, which we tell is the plot of much ado, but let's it's implicit misogyny triumph. I think the difference between Othello and much ado we might see as being Iago's increased effectiveness.
He's learnt from Don Jon and is a more serious threat. So like Othello, this is a play in which men are automatically believed. Over one, over women. Brose before hos. The military context of both plays, I think is important in this regard. And when Claudio accuses Hiro before her father at the altar, he does so in terms of sexual disgust, which identified marriage primarily as a relation between men.
Give not this rotten orange to your friend, he tells Leon, after the shame is the broken contract between male friends rather than the broken marriage between the man and woman. We can see in that scene that Leonardo immediately believes his daughter's accuser crying out in an ecstasy of shame, that it is as vehement as it is short lived. Do not live hero. Do not hope thine eyes. Only Beatrice believes implicitly in her cousin's honesty.
Perhaps it's worth observing here. The one character who is absent from this scene in which sexual politics are at their most tribal. It's striking that Shakespeare seems originally to have conceived of a role for Hero's mother in this play. And he went so far as to give her a name engine, which is registered in some stage directions in the quarter of sixteen hundred, particularly in the opening stage direction where she enters with Leonardo, Beatrice and Hero.
And if you're interested in the role of mothers in Shakespeare, this silenced character who never, never speaks and who most editors just excise just think is a kind of a mistake. A ghost character. It's quite an interesting example. An interesting test case. So imagine never speaks. Most are most scholars assume that during the course of writing the play, her role atrophied and was no longer relevant. But somehow Shakespeare didn't go back and cross it out from the beginning.
The stage directions are seen, therefore, to register an earlier remnant of the draughting process. What editors call rather rather resonantly, I think, ghost characters. But whatever the reasons, part of the effect of the excision of energy in hearer's mother is, of course, to isolate the two young women of the play and to accentuate their vulnerability to essentially patriarchal structures.
It's tantalising to wonder how Engine's presence in this scene might have shifted the balance of power in the scene of her daughter's denunciation in on the source. So stories, the mother figure is quite active in this process and that makes the women less look, look, look, look less vulnerable to a more homogenous patriarchy. Jose Rocks 2009 production of the play with Catherine Tate and David Tennant did something with this.
By shifting the role of Antonio Leonardo's brother into a female part. Antonia. So although the straightforwardness of relationships between men is irreparably damaged in this play, it could be argued that this sense of male camaraderie, in fact, prevails even beyond the repaired marriages. Much Ado is a play. Profoundly uneasy about female sexuality. Leonardo begins with a joke about whether he is really hero's father answering Don Pedro is innocent.
I think this is your daughter with the entirely unnecessary. Her mother half many times told me so. And even after hearer's infidelity has been revealed as a piece of Don Jon's Machiavellian theatre, these jokes about Cocodrie. And I think Cocodrie, like I'm arguing about jealousy. It's very clearly a relationship between men in which women are the means by which a relationship between men is is affirmed and modified. It's men who Karkoc called other other men, not really women.
So Cocodrie is a relationship between men, even after even after Harry's infidelity has been revealed as as untrue. The jokes about Cocodrie are still the currency of male interchange prints, though, are sad. Benedek notes of the redundant matchmaker Don Pedro. Get the A wife. There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with Horne. It's significant that the players last lines equate marriage with the inevitability of female unfaithfulness.
So to be married is to alway is always to be cuckolded, is always to have these home jokes hanging around you. Even though we've seen that these actors have been so dangerous and so unfair in the preceding scenes. But the play's very last lines, however, turned back to Don John, taken in flight and brought with armed men back to Matana. Some productions bring him onstage at this final point to show that his malignancy has been curtailed and contained.
But I think Don John merely represents a more general mistrust in the play. He is not its sole source. He might be a kind of scapegoat. But he certainly isn't the sole source. After all, his is a tiny part in the play. He has only four percent of the lines. But really, he represents something much larger than himself. And this may be why he is given the identity of Bustard.
His own malevolent illegitimacy might be thought a kind of walking proof that women can and some do sleep with men who are not their husbands. He is the proof that stabilises the play's paranoia about women's unfaithfulness. He seems the kind of object lesson that this really does happen. And look what it produces. So his status as a bastard does confirms the play's worst fears.
He secures the relevance of his own brand of misogyny and suspicion of women embodying the play's pornographic voyeurism and promising to show us the nightmarish but titillating sequence of women's infidelity. Now, interestingly, the scene in which Don John shows Don Pedro and Claudio, the illicit encounter at Hearer's Window is not depicted in the play. We go straight from the tight Djordje response of Claudio and Don Pedro that I've already quoted to Don Johns summons to see it.
Sorry, the tight jawed response to his summons to see what's happening into a scene in which the comic watch, led by Dogberry do some inept training onto a scene in which Hero is getting ready for her marriage. Back to Dogberry and from Venice to the chapel where the marriage is to take place. So there's no play, never shows us the scene at Hearer's Window.
There's no practical reason not to show us this pivotal scene. It could easily make use of the upper stage, rather like Juliet's balcony, for example. It's not a very demanding scene to stage in in theatrical terms. It's also, interestingly, quite a prominent feature of many of the prose sources for the play where ladder's or self careful choreography of how the lover gets to the window or how they see what's happening is is really quite important in that the way that this scene is told.
So the window scene itself seems one constant in the versions of this story as it's transmitted across languages and genres. So why would Shakespeare choose not to show it as it's a general question, in fact, about when Shakespeare chooses to tell us things rather than show them? And only in a tiny minority of cases is it? I think because it will be too difficult to show them. The stage is not capable of showing them.
Seems much more often to be a kind of thematic suggestion and also perhaps a way of putting what's being shown, what's not being shown, rather what's being told under it's in quotation marks. It may not actually be true. If you think about maybe the beginning of Julius Caesar, where offstage we hear the crowd cheering offstage and they're cheering to supposedly to make Caesar accept the crown, but we never see that.
So we don't know whether when Caesar refuses the crown, he refuses it because he really doesn't want to be king or he refuses it, saying, go and ask me again. I really do want to be king now. And that's a sort of microcosm of the way that whole play, Julius Caesar is very unclear about whether the justification for killing Caesar is is ever is ever really made. So showing and telling are always interesting. And they have very rarely, I think, to do with the actual practical results at the stage.
It's worth thinking what happens when we do see the scene in productions, because this can help us understand what it's like when it's not that. Broadly speaking, I think those theatrical and film productions of Much Ado about nothing like Jose Roarke's or like Brunner's film version, those versions which want a happy ending for the play, tend to show us the window scene. They tend to depict what Shakespeare doesn't and show us seeing what Don Pedro and Claudio see.
In part, it seems these kinds of productions want to suggest that this has been a plausible mistake, that Don Jon's scene was convincing that any reasonable person would have jumped to the same conclusion as Claudia and that therefore Claudio's acceptance of what he sees should not reflect too badly on him. When we see what he sees or thinks he sees and recognised that it is a convincing piece of stage business, we feel that he cannot be blamed too harshly for his conduct.
So this is an interpretation of the play, which is usually accompanied by lots of other cuts or interpolations, a scene perhaps in which Claudio's own mental anguish and repentance is somehow conveyed. It's one thing we never get in Shakespeare's play. Claudio is never really given the chance to say that he is that he is sorry about what has happened.
So in Jose Rog's production, Claudio spent a night in hearer's monument, listening to nihilistic rock music, necking bourbon and threatening to kill himself. And television of Piero persuaded him that it was worth living. Or we might think of the Bob Lingley adolescent Adam's apple of Robert Sean Leonard in Brunner's film showing his extreme youth, for instance, which is another way of justifying or excusing this terrible mistake.
So positive readings of the end of the play in which hero forgives Claudia and there interrupted marriages resumed, also tend to cut speeches in which Claudio and Don Pedro banter with unseemly jocularity with Leon outearned Antonio after heroes presumed death to the to the showing at the window.
Seen the depiction of the windows in is part of a whole package of things about the end of the play, which I think are done in production to try and make the hero Claudio relationship redeemable recognisably redeemable for us as as audience members. Now, as Shakespeare has actually written the play without the scene at Hearer's Window, Claudius is readiness to believe Don John goes unsupported and his response to what he believes he has seen seems even more harsh.
And in this, I think Shakespeare does depart decisively from his sources. Claudio is a much more compromised figure than the lovers in the equivalent. Stories that Shakespeare read. Claudio chooses, as he promised to shame her on her wedding day and to reject her without confronting her with his suspicions. It's a way in which the play is extremely difficult for modern audiences.
Even as Beatrice and Benedick have seemed to be the quintessentially modern Shakespearean couple, when the BBC Shakespeare retold updated Much Ado in 2005 to a contemporary newsroom setting up surprisingly well, Bea and Ben were the news anchors. Claude on the sports desk Hero was a weathercaster, was a brilliant piece of casting.
I think here would be a brilliant kind of weather weather girl with all the kind of sexist implications of that everything work except the career girl hero taking clawed back at the end. The BBC gave us the following dialogue, Claude. Maybe you would think about carrying on where we left off. Hero. What? Get married to you. Never in a million years, Claude. Okay. Maybe not in the short term.
So that was the one thing about updating the Plato modern context, which seemed impossible, that hero would type out Claudia. That's my point. But however imperfect and fearful a prospect marriage is, as Benedek ruefully acknowledges, a social inevitability, the world must be peopled. Marriage in Shakespeare's comedies functions as we know, to regulate and to legitimate sexual desire.
It's the proper outlet for sexual energy. And as in a Hollywood screwball, come at comedy like bringing up Baby or his girl Friday. The interplay, the verbal interplay between Beatrice and Benedick functions as a kind of foreplay. We know they ought to get together. We know they just need a little help. But it's striking in the play. How much social pressure exists to resolve these to confirm singletons into a couple.
Something about their refusal to do the conventional thing is an inadmissible challenge to everyone else in the play. Everybody takes the fact that they say they don't want to be together as thrown down the gauntlet to make them do so. It's like the labours of Hercules, Don Pedro says. The world of Mesner is one in which private actions and individual behaviours are all closely monitored.
Almost everything in the play is overlooked or overheard. Even our presence as the audience might be another level of the surveillance culture which governs social codes and which sacrifices privacy in the play. It's a kind of comic Sicilian 1984, and the means by which romantic resolutions are achieved in the play are remarkably similar in type,
if not in motive to those of Don John. That's to say both a plot that wants to spoil the marriage of heroine Claudio and the plot that wants to bring Birgersson Ben Benedict together use exactly the same device, setting up a scene which the characters over here or oversee, thinking that they're seeing something which is just happening authentically when in fact they're seeing something which has been set up entirely for their benefit.
We can also think that these scenarios which are manufactured are created expressly to transmit particular information and in some way socially coercive information. Beatrice hears herself accused of pride and scorn in her refusal to marry. We might recollect that choosing to remain single is never an option for women in Shakespeare's comedies.
If we think of Olivia in Twelfth Night or Isabella in measure for measure or Catarina in The Taming of the Shrew, these are all women who who proclaim at the beginning of the plays that they do not want to get married. And the plays seem to go into a kind of plot paroxysm to make sure that they are. The scene in which Beatrice hears her faults enumerated by her cousin is therefore the flip side of the imagined scene of Heroes balcony transgression.
Each is drawing on a norm of femininity or a kind of a stereotype of femininity that it's trying to bring the play's real characters back towards.
If you look at Heroes Self abnegation in the scene at the end of the play where she accepts Claudia once again as her husband, you can see that she she should see says that she has learnt her lesson from an act that she never, in fact, committed here seems to agree that she was somehow tainted and that she needed to die and and be reborn in order to be cleansed of that. So she seems to take on the charge of Claudio's suspicion, even though we know she was blameless.
So, Don, Jon is believed by the characters and I think in some sense by the plot of much ado because to contesting storylines run through the play. One is one that tries to reinstate and consolidate male bonds. That's a plot which is really implicitly a. comic and one that breaks up those bonds into marriage, i.e. a plot which conforms to comic necessity. Don Jon spins the play towards tragedy.
And momentarily the play seems as if it might Abay bringing out a frier and a crazy plan to pretend the woman was dead. That was so successful in the popular Romeo and Juliet, already well known by the time of Much Ado. Like other villains are not just in comedy. That's to say, Don Jon represents an alternative world view.
From that which comes to dominate at the end of the play. But the fight over a male world under an under kind of a romantic world is sufficiently strong for us to feel that Don John's view has at least some traction on the players psyche. The players men are anxious for the excuse that lets them off the obligation and commitment of marriage. Don John proffers that excuse. So if that's all.
Why Don Jon is believed, because the play's male characters have a weakness for his particular misogynistic view of the world. And because the play itself toys with the alternative ending he dangled before it. Why is he not successful? In the end, Don, Jon's plot is foiled by the most unlikely agents, the buffoonish Dogberry played by the Chamberlains men's favourite clown, the actor will camp and his asinine assistance.
In some ways, they are unworthy opponents. But in another way, Don Jon isn't really trying. Criticisms of Brunner's film adaptation, which called Keanu Reeves, who played on John Wooden, seemed rather to miss the point. Don John is a wooden character rather than Reeves's a wooden performance.
Unlike Jago, that's to say, or even Yakima in Cymbeline, this play is confident that comedy will have the upper hand, or rather, it doesn't really invest its blocking figure with sufficient agency, sufficient malevolence, sufficient secrecy, perhaps, to do his work. In the end, the misogynistic sexual fantasies about Cocodrie, adultery and voyeurism are packed away into an airbrushed, happy ending.
So I've been talking about Don Jon as the articulation of an anti comic under misogynistic mood in much ado that the play and more particularly its modern theatrical interpreters. This is a play firmly established in the feelgood part of the Shakespearean repertoire. This is this this is a kind of a. Comic, misogynistic, much ado that the play and it's modern and theatrical interpreters work hard to suppress.
Next, we can talk again about comic suppressions. I'm going to be talking about Midsummer Night's Dream. And the question I'm going to ask then is remind me who marries who. Thank you.