Authors: William Shakespeare, Claire McEachern
ISBN-13: 9781903436837, ISBN-10: 1903436834
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Date Published: June 2005
Edition: 3rd Edition
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.
"The text is superb…the critical introduction is predictably smart and engaging, exactly the sort of essay one would recommend to students."Eric Rasmussen, Shakespeare Survey
For more than a century educators, students and general readers have relied on The Arden Shakespeare to provide the very best scholarship and most authoritative texts available. The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.
Building a play : sources and contexts | 4 | |
The usual suspects : Ariosto and Bandello | 5 | |
Shakespeare's transformations of his sources : the creation of a social world | 11 | |
The maid | 13 | |
'How many gentlemen?' | 14 | |
The villain | 17 | |
The lover | 19 | |
Beyond the plot | 22 | |
Denouement | 23 | |
Dialogue and debate forms | 26 | |
Sexual stereotypes | 28 | |
Disdain | 33 | |
Modifications of type | 34 | |
Chaste, silent and obedient | 38 | |
Hero | 41 | |
Cuckolds | 43 | |
Structure and style | 50 | |
'The course of true love' | 51 | |
Two plots? | 58 | |
Style | 62 | |
Prose and the prosaic | 63 | |
Euphuism | 65 | |
Verbal handshakes | 70 | |
'The even road of a blank verse' | 74 | |
Image patterns | 75 | |
Songs | 76 | |
Staging Much ado | 78 | |
Tonal choices | 80 | |
Social representations | 84 | |
Choice of place and time | 98 | |
Cultural moment | 102 | |
Afterlives | 108 | |
Origins | 110 | |
Criticism | 119 | |
Text | 125 | |
First impressions | 125 | |
Making a book | 128 | |
Who's in, who's out | 133 | |
Who gets to say what? | 140 | |
Much ado about nothing | 145 | |
App | Casting chart | 319 |