Much Ado About Nothing: Shakespearean Comedy Lecture (Patreon)

This is our post-play analysis for Much Ado About Nothing.

You may wish to listen after your first reading of the play, using the lecture as an opportunity to reread. Or you may wish to listen as you make your way through the play in real time.

We have timestamps indicating the topics, with acts and scenes referenced throughout the video, so feel free to digest our discussion in the way that best serves you.

Timestamps:

• Act One
• 0:00 Shakespeare at the turn of the century
• 3:00 my personal connection with the work
• 6:20 the merits of Much Ado About Nothing
• 7:50 on Beatrice and Benedick
• 9:19 the opening of the play
• 10:00 skirmishes & verbal jousting
• 11:30 Bloom on Shakespeare’s nihilists
• 13:30 how we meet the characters
• 15:00 Claudio vs Benedick
• 16:00 the merry war of Beatrice & Benedick
• 19:00 Beatrice & the power of metaphor
• 21:00 cuckoldry & biographical readings
• 24:00 the fashions of the world
• 26:00 Lady Disdain vs Signor Mountanto
• 27:30 the battle of the sexes
• 30:00 meeting comic obstacle Don John
• 31:45 on dying a lusty old bachelor
• 33:00 potential origins for male insecurity
• 36:00 ‘thou wilt prove a notable argument’
• 39:00 when soldiers become lovers
• 40:00 love as cementing homosocial bonds
• 42:00 Don John vs Iago
• 46:00 disrupting force in comedy
• Act Two
• 47:28 women on the ideal man
• 50:00 on two kinds of irony
• 52:50 similarities between Beatrice & Benedick
• 56:00 parallelism in Much Ado About Nothing
• 58:00 the struggle of being the ones who choose
• 59:43 wooing at the masked ball
• 1:04:00 when Benedick leant his heart
• 1:05:00 hearing becomes knowledge
• 1:06:00 being won vs being met with
• 1:08:00 ‘they would talk themselves mad’
• 1:09:30 who are the better couple?
• 1:11:00 impediments as medicinal
• 1:14:00 otherness leads inwards
• 1:15:30 ‘when I said I would die a bachelor’
• 1:17:00 Benedick as sonnet in character form
• Acts Three & Four
• 1:21:00 Shakespeare the sonneteer
• 1:23:00 is Shakespeare really a love poet?
• 1:26:00 ‘let me not to the marriage of true minds’
• 1:27:30 wooing, shaming & the war of courtship
• 1:29:50 the comic relief of Dogberry
• 1:30:50 the wedding ceremony
• 1:33:00 Hero & the death/rebirth motif
• 1:36:00 ‘Kill Claudio’
• 1:40:00 Much Ado About Nothing’s resolution

Questions to Consider:

1) Have you ever met anyone like Beatrice and Benedick?

2) What qualities make the ideal partner? Do you think opposites attract? Or are we drawn to our own reflection?

3) Is Shakespeare really a love poet? 

Bonus - Let us know what your reading experience looked like. How does Much Ado About Nothing compare with Shakespeare's other comedies?

Happy reading, everybody!