fashion, that deformed thief
Some themes in Much Ado About Nothing may be too easily overlooked if we limit ourselves too much to assuming it is "nothing." Perhaps it is "about" the casus belli of love.
Across the many centuries since the Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare's timeless work demands ongoing reassessment. In today's more stressed-out than ever before world, exploration of his themes that offer fresh interpretations, and that enhance our understanding of our own times, are always valuable. So while serious critics may be fewer nowadays, and what the Bard may have “meant” from one play to another will always be all over the map, it is still a good distraction. Without attempting to arrive at consensus, critics yet stay focused on where our modern understandings and realities may take us.
What keeps Shakespeare so intriguingly relevant is how diverse the body of work is and how there is so much fertile ground for going the next level down. The output in just one of several mid-career years, 1600, demonstrates this well. During it, the quarto for Much Ado About Nothing (MAAN), a comedy, was first published (its only pre-folio version), plus Henry V and The Merchant of Venice. These three works may be what one writer described as a “brilliancy of the great trio of plays that crown this period of his work“ (Alden, p. 218). Or maybe not. Accurately dating play creation, as opposed to publication, is another angle of complexity that can yield more mysteries than certainties.
Regardless, something deep is going on in MAAN simply by virtue of being in the company of these other plays. They all show a dramatist at the height of his craft, along with other plays from roughly the same era (such as Hamlet, “thought to have been written” around the same time). In other words, MAAN must be more than an almost tragedy, “saved by bell” comedic mashup between renaissance rom-com for one young couple and dark, gothic nightmare for another, as some critics seem to view it (Andrew Dickson, for example, in The Rough Guide to Shakespeare). Even for late-in-the-game present-day audiences, we should seek and find something deeper and more intriguing going on.
Critiques and descriptions of MAAN run from so brief as to be pointless; to trite; to mundane (that is, maybe a bit more subtle); to insightful (Shakespeare After All, as always), to intriguing (Kiernan Ryan in his anthology of essays, Shakespeare's Comedies). But apart from this qualitative range, there is not nearly as much mulling over, on a subjective level, of the play’s overall themes. Here the map seems much more closely drawn, narrowing it down into something below the other plays of this period. But if we presume Shakespeare reached for the same depths of meaning throughout his career, which I certainly do, we should feel emboldened to find out what is going on thematically at the next level down.
To me, the key seems to be that MAAN is more about the suppleness of what it could be “About” rather than about “Nothing” — which in turn suggests, maybe a meaning is not there at all. As always, Shakespeare’s characters are sharply drawn, and the setting can be made brilliantly wonderful by gifted stage design of what a villa in Messina could look like, even if not trapped in the late fifteenth century. But as well-drawn as these things must be to succeed and deliver the full impact of the experience beyond the characters’ words, surely a playwright’s goal is always much larger. In my view, it is to transport the audience beyond the world of the characters as well as their own worlds because wherever that villa is situated, those in the audience would otherwise simply stay in their own seats.
But if MAAN seems purposefully designed to be at least somewhat superficial, such as by the phrase chosen for its title, we may be inclined to retreat. What can we safely say about plays in general or how Shakespeare’s comedic themes share certain qualities, such as Christian forgiveness? Beyond that, does it even matter what this play in particular is “about”? Maybe Shakespeare is making fun of our searching for it. Or maybe in our search for a larger theme regardless of the artist’s frivolity over that pursuit, we find this play delivering a higher plane of understanding that deserves to be recognized. That is, if like all of Shakespeare’s plays, MAAN is meant to transport and instruct, with intimacy, immediacy and immersive emotional topographies, and with wit, awe and anguish, it is up to us to seek and find the mirror it holds up to us, to absorb its imaginary world and to see for ourselves how Life is spelled with a capital L.
This summer, I saw MAAN in Ashland, a city that my wife and I have visited several times over the past few decades to enjoy the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as well as nearby hiking, rafting and other nearby pleasures (such as music in Jacksonville and wine tasting in Applegate Valley). OSF’s company is always strong and it delivered an admirable performance. Although southern Oregon seems hotter than it used to be, the temperature cools down in the evening and with no smoke in the air, it becomes a very nice evening. Anyway, upon returning home, I found myself still curious to get to the bottom of this overall experience, beyond first reading and then watching, and then considering points made by some of the play’s commentators. Which led in turn to this attempt to write about this personal journey into artistic success and meaning.
Among the critiques I considered, Ryan’s stood out. He fastened onto how a broad notion of “fashion” is pivotal in the play. The word is used many times and by many characters (also important to detect hints of theme) but the notion’s fullest meaning is conveyed only in a line or two by a minor character, Borachio, a gentleman in the employ of the play’s villain, Don John. “Tush!” says he, “I may as well say the fool's the fool. But seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is?”
This is not, we are advised, about how people choose to dress. Rather, it is how what controls and illuminates the characters’ lives, driving them toward deceitfulness within even the prettiest of words and worlds — and not simply by happenstance, but by the deeply ingrained habits of their society and the inherent, or inherited, traits of their personalities. It is a reality accepted without question or equivocation within these characters’ world, almost without even noticing. This is so even as the more “junior” of the two romantic pairs — Beatrice and Benedick — offer a fresh and witty counterpoint to its darkened manifestations. But they too fall in line by the play’s end, accepting if not quite clearly convinced of their mutual attraction but attributing it to maybe “no more than reason.” (“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,” Benedick tells his counterpart in a wonderful line.)
Thus, the story ultimately arrives not at a particularly happy ending, but not a sad one either. And in adhering to fashion, there are many bumps along the way. The heroine (appropriately named Hero), metaphorically dies or perhaps it is something more - but what could possibly be more (again, perhaps deliberately made unclear) on account of accusatory deceit at a place and time that should have been her apogee - the wedding alter. Her too easily accepted fate — to be paired with a cad who seems clearly beneath her — is offset by her cousin and her groom’s sidekick, who were familiar with one another before the curtain rises and were long in a kind of “merry war” with each other (1.1.59) — although as usual, the precise extent of this “war” is obscured by oblique language and vaguely expressed events.
Thus, all of MAAN’s characters labor under the same omnipresent cultural grip. Stand-in villain Don John's thin motivations are but a convenient disguise for their acting (literally, not figuratively) as their own worst enemies, engaged in various levels of double-dealing and concealment — whether good-natured or malicious — that amplify how the “fashion" of their world drives them ever deeper into unforced error and empty comfort, all amidst the splendor of a lovely villa. It leaves a “strange” quality to their derailed festivities, another word noted by Ryan as recurring often, turning what should have been a cordial extended visit into a series of events that defies any sense of what would be natural and leaves all characters to ponder the wounded condition of their hearts.
The characters in MAAN’s world thus obey their own peculiar — yet commonplace to them — sense of that “deformed thief,” fashion, as emphasized later by how the Watchman asserts first-hand knowledge of an anthropomorphized version of this character, who of course never actually shows up on stage (3.3.125). Attractions, motivations and intellects carry them all forward mountanto (what Beatrice names Benedick to mock him in the play’s opening lines, meaning an upward thrust in fencing). We must thus assume the question of just what MAAN is “about” is there somewhere, as opposed to simply “nothing.”
Here we ponder again whether the phrase used in the title is meant to indicate that what the audience should expect to see is little more than a pointless trifle. Many critics take the word “nothing” as their cue. There’s been multiple references in the literature to the homophonic similarity between "noting" and "nothing" to the Elizabethan ear, so as to suggest that how we “take note” of things is what the play is all about. But this seems shallow fishing in such a deep lake. There are also critics who have observed that because “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for vagina, the play deals with how women were objectified in the male-dominated atmosphere of Elizabethan society. But again, that point seems far too thin for what is going on here. Besides, there is plenty of mutual desire in these acts, if not all of it heartfelt, and Margaret’s great dig at Beatrice — “methinks you look with your eyes as other women do” — illustrates how much of the play assumes it always takes two to tango.
But perhaps “nothing” is not the clever hint it is often assumed to be. Maybe the better word to be used as a clue in the play’s title (if we are to go looking for one there) is the word “about.” That “about,” more broadly, is about the perils and pitfalls of the differences between them that result in a “battle between the sexes” —- but at the next level down. If so, the play could be considered about MAN, but with an extra “A.” Now perhaps an antiquated meaning, because it seems overly “gender-specific” (as if that were a fault), MAN is still an oft-enough repeated synecdoche for the idea of Humanity writ large. If so, the play’s initials are something akin to a hidden door, or at least an indirect clue (although initials were known to play a role in the word games often enjoyed at Elizabeth’s court). That second A could lead to some potentially larger truths that transcend Beatrice’s sardonic insights or Hero’s shallow fixation on attire. And, what seems most relevant here is that rather than be about misogyny or distrust as a force that guides many character actions, MAAN is more accurately about the underlying casus belli of this tendency: the why of the battle, not simply the what.
According to a frequently consulted source, casus belli is a Latin expression meaning "an act or an event that either provokes or is used to justify a war." But the phrase’s modern meaning — essentially, the grounds declared as the basis for war — is not the one typically used by those Roman writers who used the expression (by Livy or Seutonius, for example) in their contemporary writing. They use it more to convey the casualties as well as the causes of a war. Perhaps this broader meaning also folds into how MAAN’s characters decide how to behave.
We return to the play’s opening scene. Military men visiting Leonato, the governor of Messina, at his villa are back from a battle against an unnamed opponent (some commentators assert it was between Don Pedro and his “half-brother” Don John, but nothing I see in the text makes that clear). Or perhaps it was but a skirmish, or a scrape (the backstory again leaving those details unclear). No one of any note apparently, was notably injured, so this is the anything-but-ominous how and why this cast of characters has been brought together. Their habits and happenstances of courtship now pull them apart, by virtue of a casus belli of love.
So rather than being “about” nothing, let us consider what themes are suggested by this extra A in MAAN’s title that relate to such an inevitable clash. It could be about All — that is, everything — but that possibility is so broad as to be meaningless and hardly the same as All’s Well that Ends Well. Something so broadly and ill-defined amounts to little more than its own negation. Or it could be about the normality of Adultery, which is clearly a fear (or more accurately, cuckoldry) denoted by frequent references to horns, as thoroughly examined in the play’s introduction in the Norton version of the Oxford edition. Or it could be about the characters being submerged in Anger toward one another, even as they disguise it with polite turns of phrase — again satirized by Beatrice, who distills the opposite tendency to a bold essence. Or it could be about the Absence of love when not truly pursued with patience and purpose. Or it could be about the Artifice by which lives that may not actually belong together find themselves irrevocably intertwined. The dramatist expresses an apparent interest in all these things, leading the characters to find themselves enduring Anguish (until the explosive end), even while they pretend to enjoy one another’s company (although here again, Beatrice and Benedick play the comedic foil to that predilection). As Hero puts it, in referring to the wedding dress she is to wear to her ill-fated wedding, yet in a way that is neither contextualized nor expected, “God give me joy to wear it, for my heart is exceeding heavy” (3.4.24).
One last note about MAAN. Using full-text searching, through resources such as the “Works” section of the Folger Library’s very useful website, we find (as noted earlier) the repetition of certain words: “strange” (11 times), “fashion” (16 times) and “heart” (a whopping 28 times). But the word “lover” is used just once and then in a sentence that reflects feigned — not real — love (1.1.301). As Don Pedro plans to unite the young people who are the power couple of this play (assuming the subplot between Beatrice and Benedick does not subsume them, although many audience members may prefer that it did), he notes to Claudio, the foolish suitor of Hero into whose mouth he will put an older man’s words: “Thou wilt be like a lover presently, and tire the hearer with a book of words.” But this is nothing that the tongue-tied Claudio understands about what to say to his matrimonial catch.
Of course, in our mature emotional lives, we should be not like such a lover. And the play does not tire us at all with anything close to a book of loving words. If this is what MAAN is ultimately meant to be about, we may rest assured we have learned something interesting we did not know before we entered the theater.