Much Ado About Nothing

by William Shakespeare

  We then go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He or she must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear the directors of two highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways. And finally, we offer the actor’s perspective: a view of the play through the eyes of Beatrice.

  FOUR CENTURIES OF MUCH ADO: AN OVERVIEW

  Much Ado has been popular since it was first written around 1598. The title page of the 1600 Quarto announces it had been “sundrie times publikely acted by the right honorable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants.” The substitution of “Kemp” for Dogberry and “Cowley” for Verges in speech headings helps date the play1 and also tell us that the leading comedian with Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s (subsequently the King’s) Men, William Kempe, played the part of Dogberry and another comic actor, Richard Cowley, played Verges. The next references suggest the reason for its popularity. It was one of twenty plays performed at court to celebrate the marriage of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector of Palatine, in 1613 which included not only Much ado abowte nothinge but also Benedicte and Betteris, both titles assumed to refer to Shakespeare’s play. Charles I scribbled “Bennedike and Betrice” against Much Ado in his copy of the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and the poet Leonard Digges wrote in the prefatory poem to his 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems:

  …let but Beatrice

  And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice

  The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full.

  After the closure of the theaters in 1642 and their reopening in 1660 at the Restoration, the play was assigned to Sir William Davenant’s company. Davenant incorporated the ever-popular Beatrice and Benedick into his improbable adaptation of Measure for Measure, The Law Against Lovers (1662), in which Benedick becomes Angelo’s younger brother and leads an insurrection against the prison to free Claudio. Beatrice, now a wealthy heiress, is sister to Juliet, and Angelo’s ward. A younger sister, Viola, dances a sarabande with castanets. Angelo, disgusted by the low morals of women in his society, claims to have been merely testing Isabella, whom he finally marries. Benedick marries Beatrice, and the duke retires to a monastery. Samuel Pepys records he thought it “a good play and well performed.”2 Charles Johnson subsequently incorporated a number of Benedick’s lines into his 1723 adaptation of As You Like It, Love in a Forest. In 1737 James Miller also amalgamated Much Ado with Molière’s Princess d’Elide in his comedy The Universal Passion, in which Benedick and Beatrice become Lord Proteus and Delia.

  There were a handful of productions of Shakespeare’s play in the early eighteenth century, but it was David Garrick’s Drury Lane production of 1748 that reestablished it firmly in the popular repertoire, a place it has retained ever since. Garrick continued to play Benedick in frequent revivals to great popular acclaim until his retirement from the stage in 1776; Arthur Murphy, actor, writer, and Garrick’s biographer, called it “one of Mr Garrick’s best Parts in Comedy.”3 His most celebrated Beatrice was Hannah Pritchard, whose performance was “so fine that every scene between her and the great Garrick was a continued struggle for superiority, in which the spectators could not award preference.”4 Garrick was still charming audiences in the part the year before his retirement:

  In the dance in Much Ado About Nothing, he excels all the rest by the agility of his springs…In his face all can observe, without any refinement of feature, the happy intellect in his unruffled brow, and the alert observer and wit in the lively eye, often bright with roguishness. His gestures are so clear and vivacious as to arouse in one similar emotions.5

  Garrick’s lively performance contrasted with John Philip Kemble’s more serious production and stately Benedick. Using a bowdlerized text, Kemble was partnered by a number of successful Beatrices including the future King William’s mistress, Dorothea Jordan. His brother, Charles Kemble, had more success in the part which he, too, played for over thirty years from 1803 to 1836 in productions that featured a number of distinguished Beatrices, including Anne Brunton, Helen Faucit, and his own daughter, Fanny Kemble. William Charles Macready also produced the play and played Benedick. Charles Kean’s spectacular staging at the Princess’s Theatre in 1858 included “a sunset view of the port of Messina, the sun gradually disappearing in the west, casting its declining rays on the houses and ships. Then the moon rose on a brilliant masquerade scene with variegated lights from garden and bridge lamps that shone through the arches of the palace.”6

  The most successful nineteenth-century production, however, was Henry Irving’s at the Lyceum with Ellen Terry as Beatrice. It was universally admired:

  The sumptuous revival by Mr Henry Irving of this wise and witty comedy has, at any rate, proved to the public satisfaction that Shakespeare, if properly understood, is an evergreen.7

  The settings were the most sumptuous and picturesque. I can remember none more beautiful even at the Lyceum; the Bay of Messina with Leonato’s Marble Palace; the Garden; the Church; the Ballroom—never was mounting more appropriate and helpful, and the result was triumphant. As I have heard others say, and as I have always myself maintained: “The most completely satisfying entertainment I have ever known in the theater.”8

  It was the central performances of Terry and Irving that captivated audiences, though. Irving was credited with a new reading of Benedick: “He conceived the character on completely new lines and gave the play a new vitality. His Benedick was an eccentric, a fantastic, an oddity, but preux chevalier [valiant knight]; always.”9 But as Bram Stoker, Irving’s dresser, observed, Terry “was born for the part” of Beatrice. Praise of her performance was unstinting:

  Merriment is the abiding quality of Miss Ellen Terry’s Beatrice. She is Shakespeare’s “pleasant-spirited lady”; she was born in a “merry hour”; we know that a “star danced, and under that was she born”; she has a “merry heart,” and the actress leans charmingly on this view of the character. All the people about the court love Beatrice, as well they may. They know her antipathy to the rougher sex is only skin deep, and they trick her into matrimony. She is no virago or vixen, but a smiling, chaffing, madcap girl, whose laughter and high spirits are next door to tears.10

  Terry herself was more critical: “there was very much to admire in Henry Irving’s Benedick. But he gave me little help. Beatrice must be swift, swift, swift! Owing to Henry’s rather finicking, deliberate method as Benedick, I could never put the right pace into my part.”11 She also objected to a number of the traditional gags Irving continued to employ, but was impressed by the young Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s Claudio in which she thought he revealed “a touch of Leontes.”12 She was happier with the 1891 revival: “Henry has vastly improved upon his old rendering…acts larger now.”

  Terry reprised the role in 1903 with Oscar Ashe as Benedick in a production by her son Edward Gordon Craig. Its “bare and impressionistic setting”13 contrasted with the lavish spectacle of previous productions. The critic J. C. Trewin describes how “Gordon Craig indicated the church simply by the widening light that illuminated the many colors of a huge cross. Otherwise he used only curtains that hung in folds and were painted with pillars.”14 Even the acerbic George Bernard Shaw was impressed as he confided in a letter to Terry: “I went to see Much Adoodle-do yesterday evening. It is a shocking bad play…,” but he admits: “I have never seen the church scene go before—didnt [sic] think it could go, in fact.”15 The production recouped the losses Terry and Gordon Craig made on their other production—Ibsen’s The Vikings. The advent of modernist writers such as Ibsen and the theatrical experiments of William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society, which attempted to produce Shakespeare’s plays under something approaching original staging conditions, suggest a new theatrical mood. Nevertheless, initial response to Poel’s production at the
Royal Court was cool: The Times thought it “owed more to…antiquarian interest than to the histrionic talents of the players,” and was “painfully slow.”16

  Herbert Beerbohm Tree staged a lavish Victorian-style spectacular at His Majesty’s the following year. Of Beerbohm Tree’s Benedick, George Bernard Shaw said: “I defy anybody not to be amused by him. When he is not amusingly good from Mr Tree’s point of view he is amusingly bad from the classical Shakespearian point of view… It is, in its way colossal.” He admired Winifred Emery’s Beatrice though, clearly conceived in reaction to Terry’s charm in the part: “she was clever enough to play Lady Disdain instead of playing for sentimental sympathy; and the effect was keenly good and original.” This is his ironic judgment:

  All the lovely things Shakespear [sic] dispensed with are there in bounteous plenty. Fair ladies, Sicilian landscapes, Italian gardens, summer nights and dawns (compressed into five minutes), Renascential splendours, dancing, singing, masquerading, architecture, orchestration carefully culled from Wagner, Bizet, and German, and endless larks in the way of stage business devised by Mr Tree, and carried out with much innocent enjoyment, which is fairly infectious on the other side of the footlights…On the whole, my advice is, go and see it: you will never again have the chance of enjoying such an entertainment.17

  Shaw was correct in his assessment of modern theatrical trends, and the numerous productions of the early twentieth century employed the pared-down style advocated by Poel and Harley Granville Barker, which eliminated many of the traditional gags and stage business that Ellen Terry had complained of and allowed for a faster-paced, fluid acting style using a fuller text.

  The play was regularly produced in London and Stratford under directors such as Ben Greet, Harcourt Williams, William Bridges-Adams, Iden Payne, and Hugh Hunt, with a variety of distinguished actors including Sybil Thorndike, Lewis Casson, Edith Evans, Baliol Holloway, Fabia Drake, Alec Clunes, Robert Donat, George Hayes, and Margaretta Scott, and including a postwar production with William Devlin’s Dogberry as an air raid warden on a bicycle.

  The most successful postwar production was undoubtedly John Gielgud’s in 1949, which was still enjoying critical acclaim five years later:

  This production by Sir John Gielgud, with sets and dresses by Mr Mariano Andreu, is attaining to a sort of classic status. Five years ago it delighted Stratford, happily introducing Miss Peggy Ashcroft to the festival; two years later, coming to the Phoenix theatre with Miss Diana Wynyard as Beatrice, it delighted London; and now it brings Miss Ashcroft and Sir John Gielgud together again…The producer, who is also the principal actor, has had to reckon with many different actors; but his production somehow has a perennial freshness.18

  Gielgud’s unequivocally romantic production set in the Renaissance continued touring successfully until 1959. Gielgud stated his personal preference for productions set in their original period,19 but nevertheless, since then many of the most successful productions of Much Ado have been updated and moved around geographically, partly at least as a response to the greater attention that has been focused on the Claudio–Hero plot and the need to find a cultural ambience that might explain if not excuse Claudio’s callous treatment of Hero and Leonato’s response to her slander. These productions have attracted a mixed critical reception. John Houseman and Jack Landau transported their 1957 American Shakespeare Festival production, which starred Katharine Hepburn and Alfred Drake, to “the American-Spanish Southwest about a hundred years ago.” The well-known critic Brooks Atkinson continued: “It is a brisk idea for one excellent reason. Katharine Hepburn is very much the modern actress. The hard surface of modern wit, the brittle remarks, the sophisticated eyes become her, as do the flowing costumes and the Spanish headdresses with which Rouben Ter-Arutinian has draped her.”20 While Atkinson thought it all worked except Dogberry as a western sheriff, Henry Hewes thought the opposite: “The nicest performance in the show comes from Larry Gates as Dogberry, the muddled Western Sheriff.”21

  1. John Gielgud’s 1949 Stratford production with Diana Wynyard as Beatrice and Anthony Quayle as Benedick was the most successful postwar production: Gielgud himself took over the role of Benedick two years later with Peggy Ashcroft as Beatrice.

  Critics were similarly divided about Douglas Seale’s 1958 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, which V. S. Pritchett argued “impudently twitches the Bard into light opera” and moves the play forward to 1850 and the Italy of Verdi and Rossini: “This is to the advantage of the comedy which gains Romantic verve and settles for the picturesque; but a disadvantage to the melodramatic conspiracy.”22 The Times’ critic, however, came to precisely the opposite conclusion: “The period chosen was a source of profit to the more serious scenes. It was easier than usual to take Don John’s conspiracy at its face value when Don John looked and behaved as he did, as Mr Richard Johnson did, as though he had walked straight out of a portrait by Delacroix.”23 And while Pritchett admired the performances of Googie Withers as Beatrice and Michael Redgrave as Benedick, Alan Brien complained that they were “almost buried beneath all this meringue…Beatrice becomes a rattling bore whose spinsterhood is only too understandable. Michael Redgrave, too, seems uneasy inside this nineteenth-century Italian joker.”24

  Michael Langham’s production for the Stratford Festival, Ontario, of 1958, also set in “the Europe of the last century in a sort of Viennese-operetta style,”25 was warmly reviewed, especially the performances of Christopher Plummer as Benedick and Eileen Herlie as Beatrice, but less well received when it transferred to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1961 with Geraldine McEwan as Beatrice. In his 1965 National Theatre production, Franco Zeffirelli had

  the dazzlingly simple idea of placing it exactly where Shakespeare laid it himself: not in an elocutory limbo, which is where it usually happens, but in Messina…the moment the play is localized, it meshes as precisely as a watch. Instead of being the proponent of a distant love ethic that now lies pickled in troubadour poetry, Hero becomes a wretchedly believable girl trapped in perfectly recognizable Sicily where the same ferocious code of chastity endures to this day.26

  2. Rachel Kempson as Ursula, Geraldine McEwan as Hero, and Zoe Caldwell as Margaret “almost buried beneath all this meringue” in Douglas Seale’s 1958 “light opera” production at Stratford.

  Not everyone was convinced. The Times’ critic complained that

  Zeffirelli’s Sicily has enormous charm. A nattily uniformed town band parades its streets blaring forth crudely harmonized marches: the troops swagger back from the war in dress swords and plumed pill-box hats and are mobbed by a welcoming crowd of frock-coated civilians. And as for the civic statuary, Zeffirelli has provided it in the shape of self-assembling monuments—ethereal girls who drift on and freeze into Ondines at the base of a fountain, and an unearthly warrior who clambers onto a pedestal and takes up a martial stance as a local hero covered in bird droppings…But where, meanwhile, is the play?27

  There were also criticisms of Robert Graves’ textual revisions aimed at clarifying some of the denser language. B. A. Young, however, found it

  full of superb comic acting. I am no longer able to write with restraint about Maggie Smith; I can only say that the part of Beatrice might have been written for her. Robert Stephens makes Benedick a provincial Italian wide boy, who soon exchanges his uniform for a variety of sharp suits; he plays the part with sensitivity and wit, and speaks his lines most musically. Albert Finney’s Don Pedro…is a gorgeous comic creation.28

  A. J. Antoon set his 1972 New York Shakespeare Festival production in small-town Middle America:

  This is a pre–World War I America—marked by chauvinism, self-confidence and suddenly requited love. The gentlemen wear spats and carry pocket flasks. The ladies sneak a shared cigarette, and clear the smoke away before the father of the house enters. Almost everyone is inhibited by social conventions—yet everyone is having a glorious time. As sparklers flare, the couples dance Donald Saddler [ballroom] dances by
the light of Japanese lanterns—and the Central Park moon could be part of the set.29

  Some critics admired the updating and performances of Sam Waterston as Benedick and Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice, with Dogberry and the Watch played as Keystone Kops. Stanley Kauffman thought it changed “the Beatrice and Benedick backchat into very recognizable Yankee sass, without altering a word,” as well as enabling him to use “American actors as Americans instead of as fake Britishers and failed classicists.”30 Others, such as H. R. Coursen, were unconvinced:

  For some incomprehensible reason, this Much Ado is set in 1910 America. The production is defeated at the outset by its conception. Aristocratic love and Italianate intrigue collide in mid-air with small-town America, bands, balloons, and Blue Ribbon Beer. Language, “By my troth,” clashes with spats and gramophones, turkey trots, and Keystone Cops.31

  John Barton’s successful 1976 RSC production, discussed in detail below, meanwhile set the play in the India of the British Raj, creating a similarly removed, claustrophobic environment. Jerry Turner transported the play to seventeenth-century Holland in his 1977 American Conservatory Theatre production, while John Bell’s production with the Nimrod Theatre Company in Adelaide, Australia, used a circus atmosphere. Terrence Knapp’s Tokyo production set the play in late nineteenth-century Japan and employed a cultural vocabulary of Japanese references, while Dana Larson Evans offered a futuristic, space-age vision at California’s Grove Shakespeare Festival in 1980.