Much Ado About Nothing Third Series

by Shakespeare, William; McEachern, Claire

• ISBN13: 9781903436837
• ISBN10: 1903436834
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-26
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

Summary

Much Ado About Nothing boasts one of Shakespeare's most delightful heroines, most dancing wordplay, and the endearing spectacle of intellectual and social self-importance bested by the desire to love and be loved in return. It offers both the dancing wit of the "merry war" between the sexes, and a sobering vision of the costs of that combat for both men and women. Shakespeare dramatizes a social world in all of its vibrant particulars, in which characters are shaped by the relations between social convention and individual choice. This edition of the play offers in its introduction and commentary an extensive discussion of the materials that informed Shakespeare's compositional choices, both those conventional sources and other contexts, from cuckold jokes to conduct books, which inform the ideas and identities of this play. Particular attention is devoted to Renaissance understandings of gender identity and social rank, as well as to the social valences of Shakespeare's stylistic choices. A treatment of staging possibilities offers illustrations drawn from the earliest and recent theatrical practices, and a critical history examines the fate of the play in the changing trends of academic scholarship.

Author Biography

Claire McEachern is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has edited The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, and co-edited Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, as well as five volumes of the Pelican Shakespeare (1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, King John, and All's Well That Ends Well). Her other previous publications include Poetics of English Nationhood 1590-1612.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
General editors' preface	xii
Preface	xvii
Introduction	1	(144)
Building a play: sources and contexts	4	(46)
The usual suspects: Ariosto and Bandello	5	(6)
Shakespeare's transformations of his sources: the creation of a social world	11	(2)
The maid	13	(1)
'How many gentlemen?'	14	(3)
The villain	17	(2)
The lover	19	(3)
Beyond the plot	22	(1)
Denouement	23	(3)
Dialogue and debate forms	26	(2)
Sexual stereotypes	28	(5)
Disdain	33	(1)
Modifications of type	34	(4)
Chaste, silent and obedient	38	(3)
Hero	41	(2)
Cuckolds	43	(7)
Structure and style	50	(28)
The course of true love'	51	(7)
Two plots?	58	(4)
Style	62	(1)
Prose and the prosaic	63	(2)
Euphuism	65	(5)
Verbal handshakes	70	(4)
'The even road of a blank verse'	74	(1)
Image patterns	75	(1)
Songs	76	(2)
Staging Much Ado	78	(41)
Tonal choices	80	(4)
Social representations	84	(14)
Choice of place and time	98	(4)
Cultural moment	102	(6)
Afterlives	108	(2)
Origins	110	(9)
Criticism	119	(6)
Text	125	(197)
First impressions	125	(3)
Making a book	128	(5)
Who's in, who's out	133	(7)
Who gets to say what?	140	(5)
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING	145	(174)
Appendix: Casting chart	319	(3)
Abbreviations and references	322	(17)
Abbreviations used in notes	322	(1)
Works by and partly by Shakespeare	322	(2)
Editions of Shakespeare collated or referred to	324	(2)
Other works cited	326	(11)
Modern stage, film and television productions cited	337	(2)
Index	339