Much Ado About Nothing (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series) by William Shakespeare 3Rev Edition

by William Shakespeare

Paperback

About the author

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Reviews

[John Matthew IV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great scholarly look at a very funny play.

p. 1) Benedick and Beatrice: a "merry war"
Hero is unjustly slandered
p. 2) Nothing was slang for female genitalia, and was pronounced the same as "noting" which could mean "noticing" or "knowing"
Set in Messina
p. 17) The Villain: Don John
p. 19) The Lover: Claudio
p. 23) Dogberry and class: "If you meet the prince in the night you may stay him .., marry, not without the prince be willing." (3.3.73-4, 77-8) (Also page 60)
p. 25) Dogberry: "writ down an ass" (4.2.88)
p. 27) Cuckold jokes
p. 32) Benedick 1.1.223-230:
"That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she
brought me up, I likewise give her most humble
thanks: but that I will have a recheat winded in my
forehead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick,
all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do
them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the
right to trust none; and the fine is, for the which
I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor."
p. 36) Beatrice: "she is generally the most beloved of Shakespearean heroines"
p. 36) Beatrice: "Kill Claudio." (4.1.288) Also page 102.
p. 36) "What is perhaps most surprising about Beatrice's relation to convention is that her flirtation with verbal prowess never seems to compromise her sexual reputation; it rather only argues for her intellectual parity with Benedick. This is significantly unlike the assumptions of much Renaissance misogynistic writing, where the link between verbal and sexual freedom is repeatedly understood."
p. 39) 1 Corinthians, 11.3: "the head of every man is Christ and the head of the woman is the man"
p. 39) Ephesians, 5.22: "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands"
p. 42: "(Hero) is rumoured to be Don Pedro's choice; she is rumoured to be unchaste; she is rumoured to be dead; she is masked, she is buried, she is veiled."
p. 53) "Shakespeare begins most of his comedies with a problem in need of a solution; they differ in regard to what kind of problem, how seriously we are meant to take it, and what collateral damage it does before it can be put right."
p. 56) Three movements:
1) Through 2.1, one afternoon and evening
2) Represents a week
3) A 24-hour period
p. 59) "It may be no coincidence that the word 'man' and its cognates occur more frequently, by a substantial margin, in Much Ado than in any other work of Shakespeare's."
p. 63) "One of the first things schoolchildren are taught about Shakespeare is that verse typically belongs to the aristocratic main characters, and prose to the motley speakers of the non-noble subplots, as if social station was a prerequisite for verbal ornament, and learning the prorogation of the line break."
p. 84) "The eighteenth century was not fond of puns; the nineteenth, of sexual banter; the twentieth, of complicated rhetorical exhibitions (comic productions tend to favour plot over poetry, whereas tragedy's poetry is more often indulged). Each period, each production -- each performance -- offers an individual moment in the play's history."
p. 99) "Shakespeare's theatre used little scenery, and eighteenth-century stages used stock scenery, whereas Victorian productions were notoriously sumptuous exercises in pictorial realism. entailing substantial cuts to the text in order to allow for scene-shifting; running time could still approach four hours."
p. 106) 180 lines of banter between Beatrice and Benedick were cut from Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film
p. 115-118) Hero is 'Leanato's short daughter (1.1.200-1), 'too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great praise (1.1.163-5)."