1 00:00:00,390 --> 00:00:09,160 So today, I'm talking about much ado about nothing. So much ado about nothing was written in fifteen ninety eight to nine. 2 00:00:09,160 --> 00:00:16,230 I'm first published in sixteen hundred. I'm going to talk a little bit about that first quarter publication in sixteen hundred. 3 00:00:16,230 --> 00:00:21,960 Then of course it's included in the Folio in sixteen twenty three. 4 00:00:21,960 --> 00:00:27,510 As you almost certainly know, it's a romantic comedy with two pairs of lovers. 5 00:00:27,510 --> 00:00:33,450 The rebarbative and reluctant Beatrice and Benedick and disappear more conventional hero. 6 00:00:33,450 --> 00:00:45,170 And Claudio, the play's villain, Don John attempts to interrupt the courtship of heroine Claudio and almost brings about disaster. 7 00:00:45,170 --> 00:00:52,490 His machinations, however, are foiled by some unlikely comedy watchmen to bring about the play's happy ending. 8 00:00:52,490 --> 00:01:01,130 And the question I want to use to focus the discussion of the play today is why does everyone believe Don Jon? 9 00:01:01,130 --> 00:01:06,320 So let me just start with some analysis of what Don John does in this play. 10 00:01:06,320 --> 00:01:13,850 He enters in Act one, scene one where his stage direction is uncompromisingly John the bastard. 11 00:01:13,850 --> 00:01:24,620 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. 12 00:01:24,620 --> 00:01:30,230 I am not have many words, but I thank you. 13 00:01:30,230 --> 00:01:41,990 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. 14 00:01:41,990 --> 00:01:49,400 Later, we see Don Jon in full villainous mode, alone with his companions, his kind of henchmen, 15 00:01:49,400 --> 00:01:56,360 again, defined by kind of saturnine melancholy, claiming his sadness is without limit. 16 00:01:56,360 --> 00:02:02,480 Don Jon, interestingly, commits himself to a radical policy of self disclosure, 17 00:02:02,480 --> 00:02:08,770 very much in contrast to Shakespearean characters who say they are not what they are or they are not what they seem. 18 00:02:08,770 --> 00:02:17,160 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. 19 00:02:17,160 --> 00:02:19,730 He's incapable of dissimulation. 20 00:02:19,730 --> 00:02:28,070 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, 21 00:02:28,070 --> 00:02:35,120 either because they are in disguise or because their inner self and as in Hamlet, can't be can't be expressed. 22 00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:41,870 I cannot hide what I am, says Don Jon. I must be sad when I have cause and smile at No Man's Jest. 23 00:02:41,870 --> 00:02:49,340 So he's a curious kind of villain, that's to say, since he's characterised by disclosure rather than by concealment. 24 00:02:49,340 --> 00:02:53,030 I am a plain dealing villain. He tells his henchmen. 25 00:02:53,030 --> 00:03:02,840 Conrad. So news arrives to Don John that Claudio described as Don Pedro's right hand is to be married. 26 00:03:02,840 --> 00:03:10,640 Don John sees that this may prove food to my displeasure that young up. 27 00:03:10,640 --> 00:03:18,620 He says it's a great phrase for clothing. The Young Start-Up that Young Start-Up has all the glory of my overthrow. 28 00:03:18,620 --> 00:03:23,570 If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way. 29 00:03:23,570 --> 00:03:30,140 Kind of echo Shylock. There in a way, I think more perhaps about what comic villains do in these plays in a minute. 30 00:03:30,140 --> 00:03:37,780 That Young Start-Up has all the glory of my overthrow. If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way. 31 00:03:37,780 --> 00:03:46,560 Now, what's interesting to me about that is it establishes Don Jon's behaviour within a network of rivalrous male relationships. 32 00:03:46,560 --> 00:03:50,990 And that's going to be an important theme that I'm trying to think about in this lecture. 33 00:03:50,990 --> 00:03:55,850 I think, in fact, this is a whole play structured by male relationships, 34 00:03:55,850 --> 00:04:03,900 even as romantic comedy in the genre of romantic comedy encourages us to think that it's about men and women. 35 00:04:03,900 --> 00:04:09,240 Don Pedro has told Claudia that he will woo hero on his behalf. 36 00:04:09,240 --> 00:04:16,030 Part of the play's notable pattern of substituting male male relationships for male female ones. 37 00:04:16,030 --> 00:04:24,930 And we see that the wooing of hero. It's a negotiation between Claudio, Don Pedro and Leon Ahto hero herself. 38 00:04:24,930 --> 00:04:29,580 Barely figures and barely speaks. 39 00:04:29,580 --> 00:04:36,030 So it's the marriage of Claudio and Hero is seen in the play as the key to securing this network of male relationships. 40 00:04:36,030 --> 00:04:47,360 The relationship between Claudia, Don, Pedro Antley and AHTO so to undoing that relationship is also figured as the assertion of masculine bonds. 41 00:04:47,360 --> 00:04:54,480 At the ball, Don John pretends he thinks the mascot, Claudio, is, in fact Benedek, 42 00:04:54,480 --> 00:04:59,820 the whole of the masked ball is about people who are in disguise thinking they are impenetrably in disguise. 43 00:04:59,820 --> 00:05:03,410 And people who are looking at them, seeing immediately who they are. 44 00:05:03,410 --> 00:05:08,880 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. 45 00:05:08,880 --> 00:05:11,680 And everybody else, NCAA, your band at your club gets it done. 46 00:05:11,680 --> 00:05:20,220 It is absolutely clear who who is talking to just so as to Beatrice is and marketers in that same scene. 47 00:05:20,220 --> 00:05:22,800 So he pretends he thinks that the masked Claudio is, 48 00:05:22,800 --> 00:05:30,960 in fact Benedek and pretends to him in that pretence that Don Pedro is really wooing here for himself. 49 00:05:30,960 --> 00:05:37,320 As you can see, it's a fiendishly clever device. Don Jon is a real criminal mastermind here. 50 00:05:37,320 --> 00:05:42,570 Claudia's response is extremely reliable. He immediately believes that this must be true to certain. 51 00:05:42,570 --> 00:05:52,030 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. 52 00:05:52,030 --> 00:05:59,770 No, not at all. Beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melts into blood. 53 00:05:59,770 --> 00:06:03,640 Beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melts into blood. 54 00:06:03,640 --> 00:06:12,400 It's already, that's to say Hiro's fault. Now, this particular piece of misinformation is quickly delivered and quickly cleared up. 55 00:06:12,400 --> 00:06:19,630 But Don Jon is not defeated. Any impediment to him, to Claudio will be medicinal to me. 56 00:06:19,630 --> 00:06:27,550 He says. So next time around, the proposed impediment to here, Claudio's marriage is more sophisticated. 57 00:06:27,550 --> 00:06:31,510 Although actually it can't be said to come from Don John himself. 58 00:06:31,510 --> 00:06:40,550 The plot is outlined to him by his servant, Braccio, who has an understanding of some sort with Margaret Heroes' gentlewoman. 59 00:06:40,550 --> 00:06:44,720 It's a simple plot. Don John will bring Claudio. I'm Don Pedro. 60 00:06:44,720 --> 00:06:54,540 To see a kind of dumb show at Hero's Window in which she is apparently in an assignation with a secret lover. 61 00:06:54,540 --> 00:07:00,660 Don, Jon tells Claudia that his lady is disloyal. Promises to show him the proof. 62 00:07:00,660 --> 00:07:07,770 And both Claudio and Don Pedro agree that they will go to see this terrible faithlessness enacted. 63 00:07:07,770 --> 00:07:15,540 If I see anything tonight, why I should not marry her, vows Claudio tomorrow in the congregation where I should wed there. 64 00:07:15,540 --> 00:07:19,740 Will I shame her? Don Pedro agrees. 65 00:07:19,740 --> 00:07:27,390 The relationship, of course, between Clodagh Claudio and Hero is in fact really a relationship between Claudio and Don Pedro. 66 00:07:27,390 --> 00:07:35,450 And as I wooed for the to obtain her, I will join with the to disgrace her. 67 00:07:35,450 --> 00:07:44,360 There is not any whisper of suspicion about why Don Johnson should children should so troubled himself to reveal something to help Claudio. 68 00:07:44,360 --> 00:07:54,710 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, 69 00:07:54,710 --> 00:08:01,070 even though the play still calls him bastard and identity, which has clear ethical connotations in this period. 70 00:08:01,070 --> 00:08:10,080 As we can see from Edmund in King Lear, the characters seem entirely to forgotten this legible marker of what he is like. 71 00:08:10,080 --> 00:08:13,010 That may be something to do with the way the text works. 72 00:08:13,010 --> 00:08:22,340 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. 73 00:08:22,340 --> 00:08:29,460 He isn't identified as illegitimate in the speeches of the play, in the words of the play until Act four. 74 00:08:29,460 --> 00:08:37,220 Maybe a difference between what we expect in in in reading perhaps, and and what's made clear to us on the stage. 75 00:08:37,220 --> 00:08:45,520 So you can see why the question around which I wanted the lecture to focus arises, given that Don Jon scarcely troubles to hide, 76 00:08:45,520 --> 00:08:53,320 that he is malevolent, given that he bears the useful shorthand bastard as part of his name throughout the play. 77 00:08:53,320 --> 00:09:04,580 And given that his first attempt to prevent Claudio's marriage fails, why do Claudio and Don Pedro believe him so implicitly? 78 00:09:04,580 --> 00:09:08,570 Let's step back for a minute from this potential psychology of that question. 79 00:09:08,570 --> 00:09:12,980 We'll come back to that to think a bit more generically. 80 00:09:12,980 --> 00:09:20,810 The Roman new comedy on which Shakespeare often bases his own comic drama has, as we've discussed before in these lectures. 81 00:09:20,810 --> 00:09:28,160 A prominent role for a blocking figure, an anti comic figure, somebody who is interrupting comic progress, 82 00:09:28,160 --> 00:09:35,530 usually a patriarch or a similar role, someone who does not want the young couple to get married. 83 00:09:35,530 --> 00:09:43,180 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, 84 00:09:43,180 --> 00:09:51,750 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. 85 00:09:51,750 --> 00:09:56,130 In much ado about nothing, that blocking figure is displaced. 86 00:09:56,130 --> 00:10:01,530 Leonardo, the patriarch, could not be happier that his daughter is to be married off to Claudia. 87 00:10:01,530 --> 00:10:04,470 It's part of the way in which is actually a rather ineffectual figure in the 88 00:10:04,470 --> 00:10:08,460 play that he can't even take on the role that the comedy ought to give him. 89 00:10:08,460 --> 00:10:19,480 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. 90 00:10:19,480 --> 00:10:27,010 Well, that leaves a gap for blocking a gap for the figure who is blocking and Don John takes up that gap. 91 00:10:27,010 --> 00:10:31,910 He fills up the space with a kind of lateral blocking figure. 92 00:10:31,910 --> 00:10:42,650 And I think it's done johns rivalries with other men that form the ultimate challenge to the plots heterosexual conclusion. 93 00:10:42,650 --> 00:10:48,910 And so more about that we might observe, though, in passing that much ado about nothing is probably the first of Shakespeare's plays. 94 00:10:48,910 --> 00:10:56,050 Shakespeare's comic plays were a crucial blocking element is actually psychological rather than circumstantial. 95 00:10:56,050 --> 00:10:59,710 Nothing and no one is stopping Beatrice and Benedick from getting together. 96 00:10:59,710 --> 00:11:05,650 In fact, quite the opposite. The play is a kind of anti blocking and it's trying to bring them together. 97 00:11:05,650 --> 00:11:10,900 The obstacle that needs to be overcome in that case is an internal rather than an external one. 98 00:11:10,900 --> 00:11:14,980 It's something to do with that character's. 99 00:11:14,980 --> 00:11:22,000 So Don, John takes up the blocking roll, and that suggests that he is believed because the play needs a blocking figure, 100 00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:30,820 otherwise marriages happen too quickly. We've discussed before in other players delay and deferral interruption, unnecessary to plotting. 101 00:11:30,820 --> 00:11:34,630 Otherwise, things think things aren't spread out across five acts. 102 00:11:34,630 --> 00:11:39,580 Partly, it's Don John's function to provide that delay. 103 00:11:39,580 --> 00:11:49,900 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. 104 00:11:49,900 --> 00:11:56,110 The tale of the slandered but virtuous woman is a popular trope in early modern literature. 105 00:11:56,110 --> 00:12:00,640 But plots that maybe, maybe influenced Shakespearean writing much ado about nothing. 106 00:12:00,640 --> 00:12:06,850 Plots from area Stow's or Orlando Furioso and the English translations and spinoffs of that 107 00:12:06,850 --> 00:12:16,610 plot all tend to suggest that at the core of this deception plot is a male jealousy over women. 108 00:12:16,610 --> 00:12:25,940 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. 109 00:12:25,940 --> 00:12:38,700 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. 110 00:12:38,700 --> 00:12:42,540 Now, Shakespeare enjoys these plots of male rivalry over women. 111 00:12:42,540 --> 00:12:47,940 We see almost the same plot in two gentlemen of Verona and in two noble kinsmen. 112 00:12:47,940 --> 00:12:55,590 And in fact, you know, clearly the titles of those plays suggest that that male rivalry is is the crucial dynamic in them. 113 00:12:55,590 --> 00:13:00,270 But he isn't giving us one of those plots here. We don't get male rivalry over a single woman. 114 00:13:00,270 --> 00:13:08,700 A much ado about nothing, as we did in the sources. George Bernard Shaw called Don John a true natural villain, 115 00:13:08,700 --> 00:13:17,160 having no motive in this world except sheer love of evil, having no motive in this world except sheer love of evil. 116 00:13:17,160 --> 00:13:27,330 Anticipating, therefore, Jago or perhaps more precisely, recalling Coleridge, his famous description of Jago as motiveless malignity. 117 00:13:27,330 --> 00:13:34,450 But I actually think the motive in danger in Don John's case is not, in fact, entirely absent. 118 00:13:34,450 --> 00:13:41,260 Don Jon gives us a plot in which the rival object of desire is not female, but male. 119 00:13:41,260 --> 00:13:47,380 It is Claudio or through him, Don Pedro, the Don John wants to harm. 120 00:13:47,380 --> 00:13:53,950 It is male bonds that he seeks, perversely, to affirm. Hero is of no interest to him whatsoever. 121 00:13:53,950 --> 00:14:04,920 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, 122 00:14:04,920 --> 00:14:14,390 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. 123 00:14:14,390 --> 00:14:17,550 But there are problems with this kind of line of argument. 124 00:14:17,550 --> 00:14:25,080 The questions which are often asked about Don Johns more effective Avatar Jago, which put villainy and sexuality together, 125 00:14:25,080 --> 00:14:31,110 which tried to explain the Argo's motives because of some aspect of same sex desire. 126 00:14:31,110 --> 00:14:32,940 These are troubling ideologically, aren't they? 127 00:14:32,940 --> 00:14:39,360 Because they say that how you explain pathological villainy is to say that it's somehow homosexual in nature. 128 00:14:39,360 --> 00:14:44,730 So you've made an ideological gain by saying, look, there were gay people in Shakespeare's plays. 129 00:14:44,730 --> 00:14:50,940 That is again. But if you say, look, they were terribly bad, criminal, psychopathic gay people in Shakespeare's plays, 130 00:14:50,940 --> 00:14:56,760 in some ways you haven't ideologically made the game that you might have thought. A bit of an own goal. 131 00:14:56,760 --> 00:15:00,300 So I think a homosocial bonds in this play. Homosocial bonds. 132 00:15:00,300 --> 00:15:05,160 OK, so bonds, which are about a primary effective attachment between men, 133 00:15:05,160 --> 00:15:11,400 not necessarily what we would see as homosexuality is what's being repeatedly invoked. 134 00:15:11,400 --> 00:15:19,620 And it's these homosocial bonds that conspire to produce the plays real blocking structure. 135 00:15:19,620 --> 00:15:21,510 I think, Don, Jon's behaviour, therefore, 136 00:15:21,510 --> 00:15:33,890 is thus explicitly related to the play's wider depiction of male relationships and the threat these posed to comic resolution in marriage. 137 00:15:33,890 --> 00:15:40,160 All of Shakespeare's comedies dramatise the developmental movement by which young people forgo 138 00:15:40,160 --> 00:15:48,590 primary attachments to their own sex in favour of a romantic attachment to an opposite sex partner. 139 00:15:48,590 --> 00:15:53,390 Because romantic comedies on the early modern stage are directed towards the education of men. 140 00:15:53,390 --> 00:15:58,160 It's interesting that for us, rom com is a is a kind of entirely samini genre. 141 00:15:58,160 --> 00:16:01,550 But really on the Elizabethan stage, it must have been largely directed at men. 142 00:16:01,550 --> 00:16:07,430 The number of women who went to the theatre in that period is really quite so far as we know, quite small. 143 00:16:07,430 --> 00:16:12,410 Shakespeare's writing these plays for a predominantly male audience and therefore its male relationships. 144 00:16:12,410 --> 00:16:17,690 The necessity of breaking male relationships is particularly dramatised. 145 00:16:17,690 --> 00:16:26,340 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. 146 00:16:26,340 --> 00:16:37,150 She's she's tussling with implicitly with Antonio over where the Sonia's main main allegiance lies. 147 00:16:37,150 --> 00:16:41,530 This toggling between male friendship and marriage is the main theme, as I've already said, 148 00:16:41,530 --> 00:16:47,570 of two gentlemen and two noble kinsmen, and it's one way, as I suggested in my lecture on Twelfth Night, 149 00:16:47,570 --> 00:16:56,680 of thinking about the relationship between Viler Senario and Orsino, why that never fully sorts itself out or straightens out in the end, 150 00:16:56,680 --> 00:17:01,930 why violence never comes back in female clothes while Seno never calls her viler and so on. 151 00:17:01,930 --> 00:17:05,860 That might suggest that uniquely in Shakespeare's comedies or Seno does not have to 152 00:17:05,860 --> 00:17:12,520 choose between a female lover and a male best friend since DeSario Viler provides both. 153 00:17:12,520 --> 00:17:22,270 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. 154 00:17:22,270 --> 00:17:28,750 After spending more than half the play flirting and bantering while arguing that they cannot stand each other. 155 00:17:28,750 --> 00:17:38,200 Beatrice and Benedick finally acknowledged their feelings together as they are alone in the shock of heroes broken nuptials. 156 00:17:38,200 --> 00:17:42,340 I protest. I love the, says Benedek. I was about to protest. 157 00:17:42,340 --> 00:17:49,150 I loved you, replies Beatrice. Just as each one makes themselves vulnerable to the other. 158 00:17:49,150 --> 00:17:54,760 That comes immediately a terrible choice. Come bid me do anything for the office. 159 00:17:54,760 --> 00:18:03,190 Benedek. In the heady expansiveness of acknowledged love, Beatrice's reply is deadly kill Claudia. 160 00:18:03,190 --> 00:18:10,240 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. 161 00:18:10,240 --> 00:18:17,080 But we could actually try and reverse the causal relationship. The plot here is the vehicle for making Benedek break with Claudia. 162 00:18:17,080 --> 00:18:25,760 That's the most important thing rather than the other way around. To be with Beatrice means killing Claudia. 163 00:18:25,760 --> 00:18:32,930 Benedicts realisation and reluctant acceptance of this is sharp, but is not unprecedented in the play, 164 00:18:32,930 --> 00:18:37,850 that romance and marriage signal an end to certain sorts of male relationship. 165 00:18:37,850 --> 00:18:41,630 It's part of the wistfulness of the play from the beginning. 166 00:18:41,630 --> 00:18:49,850 The military camaraderie outside of the play is replaced within it by the merry war of words between Beatrice and Benedick. 167 00:18:49,850 --> 00:18:53,780 Violent plots and ambushes. A recast in the play's comic. 168 00:18:53,780 --> 00:19:05,400 Repeated tropes of overhearing and overseeing. In the final episode of the long-running television romantic comedy Friends, 169 00:19:05,400 --> 00:19:09,900 The Establishment of heterosexual coupledom, which will bring narrative closure. 170 00:19:09,900 --> 00:19:16,440 Finally, after all, the series is simultaneously seen to cut out same sex friendships, 171 00:19:16,440 --> 00:19:22,680 their losses symbolised by an extended sequence in the final episode in which the table football, 172 00:19:22,680 --> 00:19:27,800 which has been such a prominent feature of the guy's apartment. Did none of you ever watch E4? 173 00:19:27,800 --> 00:19:32,970 It's on all the time. Still is is being dismantled. 174 00:19:32,970 --> 00:19:38,630 It's a symbol of the kind of a male, a male world of male bonding period being over. 175 00:19:38,630 --> 00:19:47,280 It's a sad as a kind of poignant moment. Something similar happens in much ado, although not with the type of football. 176 00:19:47,280 --> 00:19:54,630 From the beginning of the play. Problems emerge amongst the men as they shift their interest from masculine friendship to romance. 177 00:19:54,630 --> 00:20:01,020 We have seen how under provocation from Don John Claudia suspects that Don Pedro is wielding Hero himself. 178 00:20:01,020 --> 00:20:11,380 Benedek bemoans Claudio's Munish preference for the effeminate Tabor and pipe and his new doublet over drum and fife and good armour. 179 00:20:11,380 --> 00:20:21,210 This is a clearly a distinction between the feminised interests and feminised peaceful pursuits that Claudia the lover, likes, as opposed to Claudia. 180 00:20:21,210 --> 00:20:28,180 The soldier. Shakespeare will return to this theme, the theme of broken, 181 00:20:28,180 --> 00:20:36,570 a powerful but broken male friendships and how they articulate against relationships with women in another play set. 182 00:20:36,570 --> 00:20:42,180 Like Much Ado in Sicily, which shares many themes with Much Ado, The Winter's Tale. 183 00:20:42,180 --> 00:20:50,190 Powerful male friendship between Lelantos and Polixeni is again seemed to be ruptured by the intrusion of the female like hero. 184 00:20:50,190 --> 00:21:03,000 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. 185 00:21:03,000 --> 00:21:10,770 Now, I've talked before about the way the teleology of Shakespeare's plays is sometimes under invested in their conclusions. 186 00:21:10,770 --> 00:21:16,140 The players don't want to get to the end. They know that if they're negotiating with an ending, 187 00:21:16,140 --> 00:21:25,080 which is a closing down or a kind of compromise of the issues and the drama, that the play has mobilised endings, 188 00:21:25,080 --> 00:21:36,180 often registering Shakespeare, something of that sadness that Frank Kermode sees as the sense of an ending intrinsic to narrative structure. 189 00:21:36,180 --> 00:21:43,100 I think how much do we might see a slightly modified structure in which the romantic comedy plot ending 190 00:21:43,100 --> 00:21:51,500 the ending in marriage is placed under sustained threat by the play's ongoing commitment to male bonding? 191 00:21:51,500 --> 00:21:57,080 What prevents the lovers from being together or what attempts to prevent that is a strongly fought preference 192 00:21:57,080 --> 00:22:05,000 for male company and for male society that the play liked on John himself cannot quite let go of. 193 00:22:05,000 --> 00:22:09,560 Male bonding retains a perverse hold over the men of the play. 194 00:22:09,560 --> 00:22:17,060 It offers them a last excuse not to get married. It must be significant that Don John intervenes the night before. 195 00:22:17,060 --> 00:22:25,130 Claudio is due to get married. It's the very last moment, really, when that kind of intervention might work. 196 00:22:25,130 --> 00:22:35,640 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. 197 00:22:35,640 --> 00:22:41,670 I think the difference between Othello and much ado we might see as being Iago's increased effectiveness. 198 00:22:41,670 --> 00:22:46,500 He's learnt from Don Jon and is a more serious threat. 199 00:22:46,500 --> 00:22:50,580 So like Othello, this is a play in which men are automatically believed. 200 00:22:50,580 --> 00:23:00,120 Over one, over women. Brose before hos. The military context of both plays, I think is important in this regard. 201 00:23:00,120 --> 00:23:06,270 And when Claudio accuses Hiro before her father at the altar, he does so in terms of sexual disgust, 202 00:23:06,270 --> 00:23:10,770 which identified marriage primarily as a relation between men. 203 00:23:10,770 --> 00:23:15,050 Give not this rotten orange to your friend, he tells Leon, 204 00:23:15,050 --> 00:23:23,490 after the shame is the broken contract between male friends rather than the broken marriage between the man and woman. 205 00:23:23,490 --> 00:23:30,390 We can see in that scene that Leonardo immediately believes his daughter's accuser crying out in an ecstasy of shame, 206 00:23:30,390 --> 00:23:35,130 that it is as vehement as it is short lived. Do not live hero. 207 00:23:35,130 --> 00:23:42,960 Do not hope thine eyes. Only Beatrice believes implicitly in her cousin's honesty. 208 00:23:42,960 --> 00:23:52,100 Perhaps it's worth observing here. The one character who is absent from this scene in which sexual politics are at their most tribal. 209 00:23:52,100 --> 00:23:59,070 It's striking that Shakespeare seems originally to have conceived of a role for Hero's mother in this play. 210 00:23:59,070 --> 00:24:08,330 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, 211 00:24:08,330 --> 00:24:15,390 particularly in the opening stage direction where she enters with Leonardo, Beatrice and Hero. 212 00:24:15,390 --> 00:24:20,240 And if you're interested in the role of mothers in Shakespeare, this silenced character who never, 213 00:24:20,240 --> 00:24:24,980 never speaks and who most editors just excise just think is a kind of a mistake. 214 00:24:24,980 --> 00:24:30,440 A ghost character. It's quite an interesting example. An interesting test case. 215 00:24:30,440 --> 00:24:37,850 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. 216 00:24:37,850 --> 00:24:42,020 But somehow Shakespeare didn't go back and cross it out from the beginning. 217 00:24:42,020 --> 00:24:47,780 The stage directions are seen, therefore, to register an earlier remnant of the draughting process. 218 00:24:47,780 --> 00:24:54,980 What editors call rather rather resonantly, I think, ghost characters. 219 00:24:54,980 --> 00:25:00,290 But whatever the reasons, part of the effect of the excision of energy in hearer's mother is, of course, 220 00:25:00,290 --> 00:25:08,210 to isolate the two young women of the play and to accentuate their vulnerability to essentially patriarchal structures. 221 00:25:08,210 --> 00:25:12,530 It's tantalising to wonder how Engine's presence in this scene might have shifted 222 00:25:12,530 --> 00:25:17,120 the balance of power in the scene of her daughter's denunciation in on the source. 223 00:25:17,120 --> 00:25:24,050 So stories, the mother figure is quite active in this process and that makes the women less look, 224 00:25:24,050 --> 00:25:29,510 look, look, look less vulnerable to a more homogenous patriarchy. 225 00:25:29,510 --> 00:25:35,120 Jose Rocks 2009 production of the play with Catherine Tate and David Tennant did something with this. 226 00:25:35,120 --> 00:25:40,220 By shifting the role of Antonio Leonardo's brother into a female part. 227 00:25:40,220 --> 00:25:49,820 Antonia. So although the straightforwardness of relationships between men is irreparably damaged in this play, 228 00:25:49,820 --> 00:25:57,380 it could be argued that this sense of male camaraderie, in fact, prevails even beyond the repaired marriages. 229 00:25:57,380 --> 00:26:02,030 Much Ado is a play. Profoundly uneasy about female sexuality. 230 00:26:02,030 --> 00:26:08,390 Leonardo begins with a joke about whether he is really hero's father answering Don Pedro is innocent. 231 00:26:08,390 --> 00:26:15,090 I think this is your daughter with the entirely unnecessary. Her mother half many times told me so. 232 00:26:15,090 --> 00:26:22,820 And even after hearer's infidelity has been revealed as a piece of Don Jon's Machiavellian theatre, these jokes about Cocodrie. 233 00:26:22,820 --> 00:26:26,340 And I think Cocodrie, like I'm arguing about jealousy. 234 00:26:26,340 --> 00:26:34,920 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. 235 00:26:34,920 --> 00:26:39,480 It's men who Karkoc called other other men, not really women. 236 00:26:39,480 --> 00:26:46,780 So Cocodrie is a relationship between men, even after even after Harry's infidelity has been revealed as as untrue. 237 00:26:46,780 --> 00:26:52,890 The jokes about Cocodrie are still the currency of male interchange prints, though, are sad. 238 00:26:52,890 --> 00:26:57,840 Benedek notes of the redundant matchmaker Don Pedro. Get the A wife. 239 00:26:57,840 --> 00:27:03,460 There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with Horne. 240 00:27:03,460 --> 00:27:09,130 It's significant that the players last lines equate marriage with the inevitability of female unfaithfulness. 241 00:27:09,130 --> 00:27:17,090 So to be married is to alway is always to be cuckolded, is always to have these home jokes hanging around you. 242 00:27:17,090 --> 00:27:24,020 Even though we've seen that these actors have been so dangerous and so unfair in the preceding scenes. 243 00:27:24,020 --> 00:27:31,130 But the play's very last lines, however, turned back to Don John, taken in flight and brought with armed men back to Matana. 244 00:27:31,130 --> 00:27:39,590 Some productions bring him onstage at this final point to show that his malignancy has been curtailed and contained. 245 00:27:39,590 --> 00:27:44,120 But I think Don John merely represents a more general mistrust in the play. 246 00:27:44,120 --> 00:27:50,900 He is not its sole source. He might be a kind of scapegoat. But he certainly isn't the sole source. 247 00:27:50,900 --> 00:27:56,390 After all, his is a tiny part in the play. He has only four percent of the lines. 248 00:27:56,390 --> 00:28:03,710 But really, he represents something much larger than himself. And this may be why he is given the identity of Bustard. 249 00:28:03,710 --> 00:28:15,110 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. 250 00:28:15,110 --> 00:28:20,330 He is the proof that stabilises the play's paranoia about women's unfaithfulness. 251 00:28:20,330 --> 00:28:25,700 He seems the kind of object lesson that this really does happen. And look what it produces. 252 00:28:25,700 --> 00:28:31,040 So his status as a bastard does confirms the play's worst fears. 253 00:28:31,040 --> 00:28:38,600 He secures the relevance of his own brand of misogyny and suspicion of women embodying the play's pornographic 254 00:28:38,600 --> 00:28:48,390 voyeurism and promising to show us the nightmarish but titillating sequence of women's infidelity. 255 00:28:48,390 --> 00:28:58,910 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. 256 00:28:58,910 --> 00:29:07,590 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. 257 00:29:07,590 --> 00:29:13,220 Sorry, the tight jawed response to his summons to see what's happening into a scene in which the comic watch, 258 00:29:13,220 --> 00:29:19,550 led by Dogberry do some inept training onto a scene in which Hero is getting ready for her marriage. 259 00:29:19,550 --> 00:29:24,400 Back to Dogberry and from Venice to the chapel where the marriage is to take place. 260 00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:29,600 So there's no play, never shows us the scene at Hearer's Window. 261 00:29:29,600 --> 00:29:38,420 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. 262 00:29:38,420 --> 00:29:42,830 It's not a very demanding scene to stage in in theatrical terms. 263 00:29:42,830 --> 00:29:43,880 It's also, interestingly, 264 00:29:43,880 --> 00:29:52,040 quite a prominent feature of many of the prose sources for the play where ladder's or self careful choreography of how the lover 265 00:29:52,040 --> 00:29:59,930 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. 266 00:29:59,930 --> 00:30:08,450 So the window scene itself seems one constant in the versions of this story as it's transmitted across languages and genres. 267 00:30:08,450 --> 00:30:12,260 So why would Shakespeare choose not to show it as it's a general question, 268 00:30:12,260 --> 00:30:16,550 in fact, about when Shakespeare chooses to tell us things rather than show them? 269 00:30:16,550 --> 00:30:21,350 And only in a tiny minority of cases is it? I think because it will be too difficult to show them. 270 00:30:21,350 --> 00:30:23,420 The stage is not capable of showing them. 271 00:30:23,420 --> 00:30:32,660 Seems much more often to be a kind of thematic suggestion and also perhaps a way of putting what's being shown, 272 00:30:32,660 --> 00:30:36,120 what's not being shown, rather what's being told under it's in quotation marks. 273 00:30:36,120 --> 00:30:41,120 It may not actually be true. If you think about maybe the beginning of Julius Caesar, 274 00:30:41,120 --> 00:30:50,730 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. 275 00:30:50,730 --> 00:30:53,450 So we don't know whether when Caesar refuses the crown, 276 00:30:53,450 --> 00:30:57,740 he refuses it because he really doesn't want to be king or he refuses it, saying, go and ask me again. 277 00:30:57,740 --> 00:31:02,300 I really do want to be king now. And that's a sort of microcosm of the way that whole play, 278 00:31:02,300 --> 00:31:08,360 Julius Caesar is very unclear about whether the justification for killing Caesar is is ever is ever really made. 279 00:31:08,360 --> 00:31:16,160 So showing and telling are always interesting. And they have very rarely, I think, to do with the actual practical results at the stage. 280 00:31:16,160 --> 00:31:23,810 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. 281 00:31:23,810 --> 00:31:31,490 Broadly speaking, I think those theatrical and film productions of Much Ado about nothing like Jose Roarke's or like Brunner's film version, 282 00:31:31,490 --> 00:31:36,330 those versions which want a happy ending for the play, tend to show us the window scene. 283 00:31:36,330 --> 00:31:43,280 They tend to depict what Shakespeare doesn't and show us seeing what Don Pedro and Claudio see. 284 00:31:43,280 --> 00:31:49,010 In part, it seems these kinds of productions want to suggest that this has been a plausible mistake, 285 00:31:49,010 --> 00:31:55,910 that Don Jon's scene was convincing that any reasonable person would have jumped to the same conclusion 286 00:31:55,910 --> 00:32:03,230 as Claudia and that therefore Claudio's acceptance of what he sees should not reflect too badly on him. 287 00:32:03,230 --> 00:32:09,590 When we see what he sees or thinks he sees and recognised that it is a convincing piece of stage business, 288 00:32:09,590 --> 00:32:14,420 we feel that he cannot be blamed too harshly for his conduct. 289 00:32:14,420 --> 00:32:20,900 So this is an interpretation of the play, which is usually accompanied by lots of other cuts or interpolations, 290 00:32:20,900 --> 00:32:26,900 a scene perhaps in which Claudio's own mental anguish and repentance is somehow conveyed. 291 00:32:26,900 --> 00:32:29,240 It's one thing we never get in Shakespeare's play. 292 00:32:29,240 --> 00:32:35,840 Claudio is never really given the chance to say that he is that he is sorry about what has happened. 293 00:32:35,840 --> 00:32:40,250 So in Jose Rog's production, Claudio spent a night in hearer's monument, 294 00:32:40,250 --> 00:32:45,140 listening to nihilistic rock music, necking bourbon and threatening to kill himself. 295 00:32:45,140 --> 00:32:49,970 And television of Piero persuaded him that it was worth living. 296 00:32:49,970 --> 00:32:57,200 Or we might think of the Bob Lingley adolescent Adam's apple of Robert Sean Leonard in Brunner's film showing his extreme youth, 297 00:32:57,200 --> 00:33:03,860 for instance, which is another way of justifying or excusing this terrible mistake. 298 00:33:03,860 --> 00:33:09,920 So positive readings of the end of the play in which hero forgives Claudia and there interrupted marriages resumed, 299 00:33:09,920 --> 00:33:15,800 also tend to cut speeches in which Claudio and Don Pedro banter with unseemly jocularity with 300 00:33:15,800 --> 00:33:20,640 Leon outearned Antonio after heroes presumed death to the to the showing at the window. 301 00:33:20,640 --> 00:33:24,590 Seen the depiction of the windows in is part of a whole package of things about the end of the play, 302 00:33:24,590 --> 00:33:35,120 which I think are done in production to try and make the hero Claudio relationship redeemable recognisably redeemable for us as as audience members. 303 00:33:35,120 --> 00:33:39,350 Now, as Shakespeare has actually written the play without the scene at Hearer's Window, 304 00:33:39,350 --> 00:33:48,440 Claudius is readiness to believe Don John goes unsupported and his response to what he believes he has seen seems even more harsh. 305 00:33:48,440 --> 00:33:57,930 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. 306 00:33:57,930 --> 00:34:01,790 Stories that Shakespeare read. 307 00:34:01,790 --> 00:34:11,590 Claudio chooses, as he promised to shame her on her wedding day and to reject her without confronting her with his suspicions. 308 00:34:11,590 --> 00:34:15,070 It's a way in which the play is extremely difficult for modern audiences. 309 00:34:15,070 --> 00:34:21,340 Even as Beatrice and Benedick have seemed to be the quintessentially modern Shakespearean couple, 310 00:34:21,340 --> 00:34:31,840 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. 311 00:34:31,840 --> 00:34:36,790 Claude on the sports desk Hero was a weathercaster, was a brilliant piece of casting. 312 00:34:36,790 --> 00:34:41,770 I think here would be a brilliant kind of weather weather girl with all the kind of sexist 313 00:34:41,770 --> 00:34:48,430 implications of that everything work except the career girl hero taking clawed back at the end. 314 00:34:48,430 --> 00:34:54,190 The BBC gave us the following dialogue, Claude. Maybe you would think about carrying on where we left off. 315 00:34:54,190 --> 00:34:58,600 Hero. What? Get married to you. Never in a million years, Claude. 316 00:34:58,600 --> 00:35:03,030 Okay. Maybe not in the short term. 317 00:35:03,030 --> 00:35:08,730 So that was the one thing about updating the Plato modern context, which seemed impossible, that hero would type out Claudia. 318 00:35:08,730 --> 00:35:10,410 That's my point. 319 00:35:10,410 --> 00:35:21,930 But however imperfect and fearful a prospect marriage is, as Benedek ruefully acknowledges, a social inevitability, the world must be peopled. 320 00:35:21,930 --> 00:35:28,320 Marriage in Shakespeare's comedies functions as we know, to regulate and to legitimate sexual desire. 321 00:35:28,320 --> 00:35:37,180 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. 322 00:35:37,180 --> 00:35:42,820 The interplay, the verbal interplay between Beatrice and Benedick functions as a kind of foreplay. 323 00:35:42,820 --> 00:35:48,040 We know they ought to get together. We know they just need a little help. 324 00:35:48,040 --> 00:35:56,590 But it's striking in the play. How much social pressure exists to resolve these to confirm singletons into a couple. 325 00:35:56,590 --> 00:36:02,830 Something about their refusal to do the conventional thing is an inadmissible challenge to everyone else in the play. 326 00:36:02,830 --> 00:36:09,430 Everybody takes the fact that they say they don't want to be together as thrown down the gauntlet to make them do so. 327 00:36:09,430 --> 00:36:13,330 It's like the labours of Hercules, Don Pedro says. 328 00:36:13,330 --> 00:36:20,440 The world of Mesner is one in which private actions and individual behaviours are all closely monitored. 329 00:36:20,440 --> 00:36:27,790 Almost everything in the play is overlooked or overheard. Even our presence as the audience might be another level of the surveillance 330 00:36:27,790 --> 00:36:33,160 culture which governs social codes and which sacrifices privacy in the play. 331 00:36:33,160 --> 00:36:42,730 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, 332 00:36:42,730 --> 00:36:50,500 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 333 00:36:50,500 --> 00:36:55,210 plot that wants to bring Birgersson Ben Benedict together use exactly the same device, 334 00:36:55,210 --> 00:36:59,980 setting up a scene which the characters over here or oversee, 335 00:36:59,980 --> 00:37:03,550 thinking that they're seeing something which is just happening authentically when 336 00:37:03,550 --> 00:37:09,670 in fact they're seeing something which has been set up entirely for their benefit. 337 00:37:09,670 --> 00:37:15,130 We can also think that these scenarios which are manufactured are created expressly 338 00:37:15,130 --> 00:37:20,110 to transmit particular information and in some way socially coercive information. 339 00:37:20,110 --> 00:37:26,050 Beatrice hears herself accused of pride and scorn in her refusal to marry. 340 00:37:26,050 --> 00:37:32,260 We might recollect that choosing to remain single is never an option for women in Shakespeare's comedies. 341 00:37:32,260 --> 00:37:38,470 If we think of Olivia in Twelfth Night or Isabella in measure for measure or Catarina in The Taming of the Shrew, 342 00:37:38,470 --> 00:37:43,870 these are all women who who proclaim at the beginning of the plays that they do not want to get married. 343 00:37:43,870 --> 00:37:50,330 And the plays seem to go into a kind of plot paroxysm to make sure that they are. 344 00:37:50,330 --> 00:37:54,200 The scene in which Beatrice hears her faults enumerated by her cousin is 345 00:37:54,200 --> 00:37:58,700 therefore the flip side of the imagined scene of Heroes balcony transgression. 346 00:37:58,700 --> 00:38:09,140 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. 347 00:38:09,140 --> 00:38:16,100 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, 348 00:38:16,100 --> 00:38:21,260 you can see that she she should see says that she has learnt her lesson from an act that she never, 349 00:38:21,260 --> 00:38:32,360 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. 350 00:38:32,360 --> 00:38:40,340 So she seems to take on the charge of Claudio's suspicion, even though we know she was blameless. 351 00:38:40,340 --> 00:38:50,180 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. 352 00:38:50,180 --> 00:38:54,310 One is one that tries to reinstate and consolidate male bonds. 353 00:38:54,310 --> 00:39:06,080 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. 354 00:39:06,080 --> 00:39:09,220 Don Jon spins the play towards tragedy. 355 00:39:09,220 --> 00:39:16,670 And momentarily the play seems as if it might Abay bringing out a frier and a crazy plan to pretend the woman was dead. 356 00:39:16,670 --> 00:39:23,520 That was so successful in the popular Romeo and Juliet, already well known by the time of Much Ado. 357 00:39:23,520 --> 00:39:30,240 Like other villains are not just in comedy. That's to say, Don Jon represents an alternative world view. 358 00:39:30,240 --> 00:39:42,150 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 359 00:39:42,150 --> 00:39:48,390 strong for us to feel that Don John's view has at least some traction on the players psyche. 360 00:39:48,390 --> 00:39:53,160 The players men are anxious for the excuse that lets them off the obligation and commitment of marriage. 361 00:39:53,160 --> 00:40:00,140 Don John proffers that excuse. So if that's all. 362 00:40:00,140 --> 00:40:07,620 Why Don Jon is believed, because the play's male characters have a weakness for his particular misogynistic view of the world. 363 00:40:07,620 --> 00:40:12,830 And because the play itself toys with the alternative ending he dangled before it. 364 00:40:12,830 --> 00:40:19,870 Why is he not successful? In the end, Don, Jon's plot is foiled by the most unlikely agents, 365 00:40:19,870 --> 00:40:27,280 the buffoonish Dogberry played by the Chamberlains men's favourite clown, the actor will camp and his asinine assistance. 366 00:40:27,280 --> 00:40:34,210 In some ways, they are unworthy opponents. But in another way, Don Jon isn't really trying. 367 00:40:34,210 --> 00:40:42,280 Criticisms of Brunner's film adaptation, which called Keanu Reeves, who played on John Wooden, seemed rather to miss the point. 368 00:40:42,280 --> 00:40:48,460 Don John is a wooden character rather than Reeves's a wooden performance. 369 00:40:48,460 --> 00:40:58,000 Unlike Jago, that's to say, or even Yakima in Cymbeline, this play is confident that comedy will have the upper hand, or rather, 370 00:40:58,000 --> 00:41:07,930 it doesn't really invest its blocking figure with sufficient agency, sufficient malevolence, sufficient secrecy, perhaps, to do his work. 371 00:41:07,930 --> 00:41:19,500 In the end, the misogynistic sexual fantasies about Cocodrie, adultery and voyeurism are packed away into an airbrushed, happy ending. 372 00:41:19,500 --> 00:41:23,880 So I've been talking about Don Jon as the articulation of an anti comic under misogynistic 373 00:41:23,880 --> 00:41:29,160 mood in much ado that the play and more particularly its modern theatrical interpreters. 374 00:41:29,160 --> 00:41:34,590 This is a play firmly established in the feelgood part of the Shakespearean repertoire. 375 00:41:34,590 --> 00:41:42,960 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. 376 00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:48,660 Next, we can talk again about comic suppressions. I'm going to be talking about Midsummer Night's Dream. 377 00:41:48,660 --> 00:41:53,200 And the question I'm going to ask then is remind me who marries who. 378 00:41:53,200 --> 00:41:58,848 Thank you.