Date and Sources
Much Ado About Nothing marks Shakespeare's greatest achievement in comedy with As You Like It and The Twelfth Night. The date of its first performance was 1598 and it was probably printed two years later. A story by Italian author Matteo Bandello is the source of the plot (as it happened for Romeo and Juliet too). Shakespeare read Bandello in the French version by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques.
Themes
The central part of the action turns on two main plots: the Hero-Claudio plot, which is a conventional story belonging to the tragi-comedy type, and the Beatrice-Benedick plot, belonging to the comedy of wit. In this way we are offered differrent views of the same reality, views which we might call respectively romantic and realistic, in whose clash and interrelatio lies a great part of the substance of the play.
The overall theme of the play is "the power of report, of the thing overheard, to alter human destiny". Eavesdropping and misinterpretation, disguise and deceit, sometimes for evil purpose, but generally in fun and with a comic end, make up the dramatic pattern of the play.
Shakespeare explores the nature and the limitation of love, as well as of the accepted code of honour, in a brilliant and dynamic society. In the foreground are the young, real creatures of mutability with their intense lives, their games and jokes, easy enthusiasm and excesses.
Language and Imagery
Beatrice and Benedick stand at a distance from their own words; language is a sort of mask behind which they protect their inner feelings and privacy. They talk a witty, articulate prose, whereas the Hero-Claudio plot is mainly written in verse.
Clothes images dominate the play and the most frequent figure of speech is antithesis. Clothes symbolise the difference between appearence and reality, and hypocrisy. There is also a setting of active outdoor work and sport characterised by the lively images of dancing, music, song, riding, galloping, hunting, which contribute to the sparkling, unsentimental atmosphere of the play.
(source: Spiazzi - Tavella, Only Connect, Volume One, Zanichelli, 2000)
Characters (see Power Point Slides)
Work on the movie adaptation
No comments:
Post a Comment