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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 261: “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Acts 1 & 2
01:22:46
Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and our series on by William Shakespeare. This week Angelina and Thomas are discussing Acts 1 and 2 and will try to do that by talking about the story as a whole, not simply focussing on the characters. They...
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- [00:19]
Angelina Stanford
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and here with me is the man that I like to think of as the Benedict to my Beatrice.
- [01:37]
Thomas Banks
Senor Montanto.
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Angelina Stanford
Senor Montanto. At least I'm not Lady Disdain.
- [01:41]
Thomas Banks
No, no, I was thinking of calling.
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Angelina Stanford
You that, but no, I appreciate the self restraint. See, that's what, that's what makes you. Separates you from Benedict, this level of incredible self restraint that you have.
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Thomas Banks
I have a filter.
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Angelina Stanford
You do? You do. I don't. I'm the one. Well, maybe we have a filter between us and we just take.
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Thomas Banks
I let you borrow mine sometimes.
- [01:59]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, sometimes you put it on me forcibly like a muzzle. See, look at this Benedictine Beatrice banter we've got going on here. We are doing episode two here today of our series on William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. And we're going to talk about Act 1 and as much of Act 2 as we get through, perhaps all of it, perhaps not. But we'll take a good stab at it. Before we get started, though, just a quick reminder about some of the things we've got coming up at the House of Humane Letters, which is our. Our business. This is the business that sponsors this podcast and allows this podcast to be free. So we've got some pretty exciting things coming up, and I mentioned some of those last time. So today I just want to focus on what we've got going on this week. And if you're listening to this later, it's okay. You can still grab the recording for this. Everything we do is live or later, and this webinar will be no different. So this is coming up January 29th. I've been really excited about this for months. This is a webinar called Through a Looking Glass. Dimly Recovering the Wonder of the Alice Books. Here's the description. By the time of Lewis Carroll's death in 1890, 8. Macmillan had printed over 150,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and over 100,000 of its companions. Through the Looking Glass. The Alice books remain the most translated into foreign languages. After the Bible and Shakespeare, it has become one of the most widely quoted books in the Western world. There were already 75 editions in over 70 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish, available by 1993. Yet in some ways, the popularity of Alice has worked against her in recent decades, as she has faded from the bookshelves to become most prominent as a familiar figure on anything from throw pillows to dishware. Alice has been lost to advertising. And the most common sentiment that faces readers of the Alice books today is one of confusion. What was it, then, that prompted generations of readers to feel that Alice was essential to their libraries? What quality enabled writers as diverse as Walter de la Mare, G.K. chesterton, Christina Rossetti, James Joyce and Northrop Fry to write in praise and defense of her presence among the giants of English literature? Undoubtedly, we have lost Alice, but it remains to be seen if Alice has lost us. The aim of this webinar is to make a step towards rediscovering the wonder of the Alice books and to open the door onto the grand conversation that nonsense has been carrying on with all other stories. Perhaps it is true that, as G.K. chesterton writes, nonsense has its own vision of the cosmos to offer us, and that while faith can be called nonsense, it is more true to say that nonsense is a kind of faith.
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Thomas Banks
That is stirring.
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Angelina Stanford
It is stirring. Fantastic job with that write up. So that is. This is going to be a webinar. I will be there, but mostly I'll be handing off the reins to my protege, Addison Hornstra. She has done an amazing job with the research and I am so excited.
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Thomas Banks
Can she pack it all into an hour and a half?
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Angelina Stanford
Probably not. You're going to get much more than an hour and a half.
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Thomas Banks
That's all for the best.
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Angelina Stanford
A lot of bang for your buck. She's keeping up with that glorious house of humane letters tradition, where we give you way, way more for your money.
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Thomas Banks
No, I look forward to this and it'll give me an opportunity to face some of my childhood fears. No, no, I mean, you laugh. I'm not joking. See, I was. Alice in Wonderland frightened me as a child. The book illustrations, not the story itself.
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Angelina Stanford
Tenniel illustration.
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Thomas Banks
So the Tenniel illustrations frightened me. Not like the Jabberwocky or anything. It was Alice herself because she had an adult sized head on a child's body. And that I found, I don't know, there was something uncanny and frightening about that to me.
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Angelina Stanford
You continue to fascinate me, sir.
- [05:48]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. So Alice frightened me as a kid.
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Angelina Stanford
You think you know a man.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
Wow, this is so interesting.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
My understanding is.
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Thomas Banks
And I like.
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Angelina Stanford
I've always crazy about those illustrations. He kind of fought them, from what I understand.
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Thomas Banks
Right. That that would be the source of a profitable essay right there. Children's classics where the vision of the writer did not match those of the illustrator. You could bring in Pauline. What's her name? Baynes. See, I like the Narnia illustrations, for the most part.
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Angelina Stanford
Came around to them.
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Thomas Banks
Some of them, I think, are actually really good. The Last Battle has some that are terrifying, but also, I think, very effective.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, he was very gracious to her. We're talking about the illustrator of the Chronicles of Narnia books. One of the Chronicles of Narnia. I can't remember which one. Go ahead, fans, tell me in the comments. One of them won the Newbery Award for children's literature, and he was very gracious and said that he was sure the award really was due to Pauline Baines because no doubt, illustrations that had made it the classic.
- [06:53]
Thomas Banks
Always a Mensch, C.S. lewis. Always a mensch.
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Angelina Stanford
Always. Well, shall we get started with this episode? Do you have a commonplace quote to share with us?
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Thomas Banks
Indeed I do, Mr. I have one from the Roman mock didactic poet, the Ars Amatoria of Ovid. That is the Art of Love.
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Angelina Stanford
Yes. I find myself wondering instantly, why are you perusing the Art of Love? Is this something I need to know about?
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Thomas Banks
I've read it more than once. Yeah. So in Latin, tempore difficile, which is roughly translated in time, the difficult bulls come to the plough.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, that is very appropriate for this play. Yes, that is very appropriate. We've got two difficult bulls that have to be taken to the plow by their friends. Oh, that's. That's. That's very, very well, very well noted there.
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Thomas Banks
And we will have cause to recur to this particular line from Ovid again because, well, Shakespeare makes his own use of it.
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Angelina Stanford
He does. Actually. There's several Ovid references in these scenes that we read. And just in general, I like to track how many times he references Ovid just in his plays, because Ovid's Metamorphosis, the far greater literary influence on medieval and Renaissance literature than, say, some others we might think of Ovid.
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Thomas Banks
I think there are probably more allusions to Ovid in Shakespeare than to any other classical author. Maybe with the exception of Virgil. Right. And there's, you know, a good number of other Claudus and Seneca.
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Angelina Stanford
Well, I love medieval literature is the intersection of Virgil and Ovid. And that's not an original observation by me, but. So, yes, you definitely see. You definitely see that.
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Thomas Banks
Oh, very much.
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Angelina Stanford
All right, well, my quote. I decided I would share another quote from Northrop Fry about Shakespeare because I thought it would be helpful for orienting us in what we're going to talk about today. So if you're new to the podcast, you really should take to heart what we say in the opening. This is not a book chat podcast. This really is an ongoing conversation. And so this is, I think, our fifth Shakespeare play. We've done something like that. Something like that. And so I'm not just going to repeat all the same old things we say. And I'm just going to continue to try to unfold new layers of Shakespeare for you. And so this is all part of an ongoing conversation to try to recapture the old ways of reading. And so this quote from Northrop Fry is about a common mistake people make when approaching Shakespeare. And it's so common that some of you might scratch your head and say, wait, what? What? What is she talking about? What is he talking about? We're not supposed to do this. Then what else is is there? Right? We'll just be patient. Maybe we'll show you what else there is. So here's the quote. In every play Shakespeare wrote, the hero or central character is the theater itself. His characters are so vivid that we often think of them as detachable from the play, like real people. So such questions as, is Falstaff really a coward? Have been discussed since the 18th century. But if we ask what Falstaff is, the answer is that he isn't. He's a character in a play, has no existence outside that play, and what is real about him is his function in the play. All right, skipping forward a few lines. I stress this because for the last century or so, serious literature has been largely character centered. Skipping forward a few lines more, it seems clear that Shakespeare did not start with a character and put him into a situation. If he'd work that way, his great characters would have been far less complex than they are. Obviously, he starts with the total situation and lets the characters unfold from it. Like leaves on a branch, part of the branch, but responsive to every tremor of wind that blows over them.
- [10:48]
Thomas Banks
That's actually a very good survey of Shakespearean studies for a very long time. And that's true. Maybe It's. Maybe we shouldn't play the blame game, but I'm going to anyway.
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Angelina Stanford
Do it.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah. So character centric studies in Shakespeare. Do you think that might begin with Hazlitt?
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Angelina Stanford
I was just gonna ask.
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Thomas Banks
I think Hazlitt has something to do. And actually, I think Hazlitt was a very able Shakespearean interpreter. I think his. His book, the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is. That's still one of the Shakespeare sources of criticism I recur to the most, and I enjoy most of it. But yes, that's. There is something about that.
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Angelina Stanford
Necessarily think that that's a bad work of criticism. It's more like, well, it got the pendulum swinging in that direction and people jumped on and went way too far. That pendulum became a bit of a wrecking ball.
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Thomas Banks
Oh, sure.
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Angelina Stanford
And if you listen to our episodes on Aristotle's Poetics, some of what Fry just said may sound very familiar to you. Aristotle argues that in drama, the plot does not exist for the sake of the character, but the character exists for the sake of the plot. You might want to pause and go listen to that whole series if you're scratching your head about that, because that, of course, is the exact opposite way that we look at it. Now. We think, in fact, they teach this in writing classes now, and this might explain why we can't write a decent movie or book right now to save our lives. But they start with the idea that you just develop a character, don't even have a plot, just let the character sort of wander around in the world you created, and there you've got a story. But of course, that's not how you write a story, not according to Aristotle, not according to Shakespeare. For them, you start with the plot, and the character exists for the plot. The character exists to move forward the plot. Now, even when I say the plot again, we talked about this at length in the Poetics episodes. You might be thinking, well, the plot is just like one action after another. That's not exactly what the plot is. Because we think, oh, if it's just plot driven, it must be. It must be very small. No, when we say plot, we mean the series of events. That is the story as a whole story, capital S. So I have Another quote from C.S. lewis to support this idea that this is how you read Shakespeare, not for character, but for plot. And I love that in these quotes, he's capitalizing the S in story. He's talking about the total story. This is what CS Lewis is getting at in Experiment criticism when he says, you must Receive the story. It is astonishing. Oh, this is from an essay called On Stories. It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to story, capital S considered in itself granted, the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and above all, the delineation of the characters have been abundantly discussed. So in that sentence he had story with a small S. Now he's going back to capital S. But the capital S story itself, this series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character. There are indeed three notable exceptions. Aristotle in the Poetics, constructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts story, capital S in the center and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place. In the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, Boccaccio and others developed an allegorical theory of capital S stories to explain the ancient myths. And in our own time, Young and his followers have produced their doctrine of archetypes. Apart from these three attempts, the subject has been left almost untouched. And this has had a curious result.
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Thomas Banks
Who's the young he refers to? Oh, sorry, I was. Wow. I mentally heard that as Y o u n g. Yeah, what he's referring to.
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Angelina Stanford
So one of the very, very first archetypal books on literature was Ahmad Bodkin about archetypal images and poetry. This was like in the 1920s and she was trying to apply Carl Jung's theory to literature. It's a book that's kind of hit or miss, but what I appreciate about it is that she was responding back to all the heavy Freudian criticism and offering. Maybe there's a different way to read this than just through the Freudian lens, but we're going to try to do that in this series. Figure out what does it mean to talk about a story as a whole. And you'll notice when you listen to other people talk about Shakespeare, they almost exclusively talk about the characters. Oh, what's their motivation? What happened to Benedict and Beatrice? Why are they the way they are? Or more famously, why is Don John the way he is? And we'll talk about that more as we get to his scene. But we're going to try to approach this like a pre modern would have read it like the original audience would have received it, being interested in the story as a whole and not hyper fixating on the characters. One of the things that happens when you read Shakespeare if you hyper fixate on the characters is you find yourself scratching your head all the time. Why this? Why that? Oh, Shakespeare must believe X, Y and Z about women, or X, Y and Z about, you know, clergy, when really he just is thinking to himself, the story needs somebody to do this, to move it forward. And so let's just have this character do it. It doesn't function in the way that you think it does. And I would argue, and hopefully we can see this in the series. What he does is so much greater. It's so much greater. And because we have lost this old way to talk about stories, all we're left with is chit chat about characters, which for me is always so incredibly boring and misses the point.
- [16:18]
Thomas Banks
I think another false scent that a lot of critics pursue is attempt to solve the question, which of Shakespeare's characters are really Shakespeare himself?
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Angelina Stanford
Biographical foul.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah. Which characters are spokesperson for his particular views on life? As though this is like there's some talisman that will enable us to figure that out. And yeah, oddly, some people have given the answer that Falstaff. It's Falstaff who is really speaks for Shakespeare.
- [16:49]
Angelina Stanford
I'm going to get on one of my heels here and the audience is like, yay. I talk about this in my classes. One of the things that really irritates me about bad literary criticism is that it seems to just forget what it is to be a human. What I mean by that is, okay, I talk a lot, as you know, I talk way more than you do. Is everything out of my mouth a well vetted, well thought out position of mine? Absolutely.
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Thomas Banks
Of course, dear. No, absolutely not.
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Angelina Stanford
I'm a human being, right. I go off half cocked about all kinds of things. And because I'm a storyteller, yes, Shocking, right? Human beings all the time say things they don't even really mean. I'm a storyteller and you know this about me. Once I realize I have set up a joke, I will exaggerate myself for comic effect all the time. It works really well in my classes. My students know this about me. I exaggerate for comic effect because that is what the story required. And we all know this about ourselves. We all know that we do that to get the laugh out of somebody. You know, you push it a little further than you really actually believe because that's what makes it funny to be exaggerated. But then you encounter somebody like Shakespeare who's a professional storyteller and you think, oh, no, he's not exaggerating for effect. No, no, no, no, no. This is 100% what he believes. These comic speeches or these tragic speeches, they're not just for a Dramatic or comic effect in the play? Oh, God forbid. No, they're treatises. They're treatises of Shakespeare. And that's just absurd. That is not how human beings act. But again, I would argue that it's because we no longer know how to read these old books that we are just. We're just left, you know, grasping at straws here, trying to come up with anything to say. But one of my favorite lines in C.S. lewis's experiment and criticism is forced to talk about literature. We turn literature into something to talk about. And I think that that's true. So we talk about the characters. We talk about. Is this really Shakespeare? None of that is the point. And the point is so much better. So let's jump in and start with the title, Much Ado About Nothing. So if you know anything about Shakespeare at all, you know, he. He loves a good pun, and he loves having multiple layers of things going on in the story. And so we're going to see here that the title is no different. So nothing in the Renaissance would have actually been pronounced noting. And noting has a couple of different meanings. One is noting means eavesdropping. So if we read the first two acts, we know that eavesdropping is a.
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Thomas Banks
There's several point. Yes.
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Angelina Stanford
Everybody's listening in on everybody else.
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Thomas Banks
So sometimes hearing things that aren't actually said or done.
- [19:34]
Angelina Stanford
Correct. So we're going to have that, too. Misinformation based on eavesdropping. Partially. Having heard things so Much Ado about eavesdropping, essentially. Right. All of this drama. I don't want to say too much more because we're not into the conflict yet, but a lot of. To do a kerfuffle is going to happen over some Eve.
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Thomas Banks
Sorry. I think this might help illustrate. Did you know that The War of 1812 was popularly known for a while in the 19th century as the War of Faulty Communication?
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Angelina Stanford
I did not. That is fascinating.
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Thomas Banks
Okay. And one of the reasons for this, the last. The great climactic battle of the War of 1812, which is the. And you, of course, will know this. The Battle of New Orleans with Andrew Jackson and Who's the French pilot?
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Angelina Stanford
Jean Lafitte.
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Thomas Banks
Jean Laffite, yeah. Okay. By the way, that was like the one battle of the war where Americans actually did really well and won a decisive victory. The sad thing is. The really sad thing, it happened after the peace treaty that officially ended the war had been signed. But there are no telegraphs yet or other means of rapid communication. So the war in the. The provinces went on for a little bit too long. Anyway, this play could almost be like the courtships of faulty communication.
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Angelina Stanford
I am forever going to call this war the War of Faulty Communication.
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Thomas Banks
I think that's such a better name. Like the War of 1812. How boring is that? Yeah. Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
All right. Another level then of Much Ado about noting is noting can also mean a musical notation. So you may have noticed, and we'll point this out as we get there, that there was some conversation about dancing and music and a metaphor that love and wooing and wedding are like different types of dances. So we will talk about that in the role of music and dancing and harmony in this play. And then the third level of pun, which I wasn't even going to bring up, but I noticed that our patreons in the Discord were tagging me and saying, I heard this thing. Is this true? So we will. We will bring it up. Would you. How shall we euphemistically speak of this, Mr. Banks?
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Thomas Banks
Oh, wow. Put it in my lap. Totally put it in my lap. Nothing also is.
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Angelina Stanford
How about this? We'll say, because we know there are little ears in the cars.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
One of the meanings is a innuendo.
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Thomas Banks
Yes.
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Angelina Stanford
A double entendre. Or as my professor, my Shakespeare professor said, a double entendre. So there is a double entente. And while I. I mean, I've read enough Shakespeare to know that he does not shy away from a double entendre pun. And I do think that you could kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge, that that's a pun. That's a layer of the pun. People who want to argue that that's what the play is all about, that it's just one long sexual innuendo. No, absolutely not. There is so much more going on than that.
- [22:26]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. And also, as with at least one other of Shakespeare's plays, with as you like it, the play, I think Shakespeare's kind of advertising up front that this is light hearted and this is a bagatelle. This is a comic trifle. And don't expect anything really dark here. Anything of too grave or weighty a kind.
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Angelina Stanford
Exactly. So. All right. Well, I was. Maybe the best way to approach this is to just start going through scene by scene, line by line.
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Thomas Banks
Absolutely.
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Angelina Stanford
Pointing out some things, pausing as we need to, to sort of fill in how the original audience would have perceived this. All Shakespeare plays have five acts. We should mention that. And we will talk about the shape of a comedy versus the shape of a tragedy as we go through. Again, we've Talked about this at length in some of the other Shakespeare episodes, but the audience would have known, going right in that this is a comedy and therefore is going to have a happy ending. And it's very, very most reductionist comedy means happy ending. Happy ending. We will add to that as we go. But we should see then this kind of lightheartedness. As you say, there's no one, it's not in danger that at any point are Benedict and Beatrice going to come to blows and accidentally stab each other.
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Thomas Banks
And while this play does have in the middle of it one, well, at least one really evil character, even the evil in this play has something kind of trivial about it.
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Angelina Stanford
Totally.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah. It's the kind of evil that you laugh at like you would laugh at. I don't know. It is to evil what the, what the Count in Sesame street is to vampires.
- [24:06]
Angelina Stanford
Almost like it's say Much Ado About Nothing is a farce, but it's almost a farce. Like it's light hearted. Yeah, it's lighthearted. So a farce would be the Three Stooges, Our Home Alone or Tom and Jerry where, you know, it's just this really over the top, you know, you don't sit around and give the bad guys at Home Alone a whole tragic bag story, you know, oh, his actually heat was turned off at Christmas and, you know, he's just trying to stay alive for the kids during the holidays. Why is Kevin McAllister trying to stop?
- [24:38]
Thomas Banks
I think we were talking about this recently because we watched it over the holidays. But every Christmas now for like the last 10 years, I see at least one think piece come out talking about how Home Alone is an index of like, you know, the decline of the American family and parents not paying enough attention to their children and being neglectful and all that kind of thing. So, yes, people have started to see, like very dark subtexts in Home Alone.
- [25:02]
Angelina Stanford
I wonder if our audience can actually hear the facial expression I'm making right now. They just, just hear, hear the disday. I am Lady Disdain now.
- [25:09]
Thomas Banks
You are Lady Disdain now.
- [25:10]
Angelina Stanford
It's dripping off of me. It's a farce. Yeah, you don't, you don't take a farce any more seriously than you take the Three Stooges. Are Tom and Jerry like and. And violence in a farce. It's comical, it's light hearted, and no one takes it. No one takes it seriously. So Taming of the Shrew is an example of a farce now. Much Ado About Nothing has a lot in common With Taming of the Shrew, the prototypes of Benedict and Beatrice are absolutely Kate and Petruchio, 100%. This play comes later, and he's reviving some of these older themes. I feel like it's a deliberate nod. If you listen to some of the earlier Shakespeare episodes we did when Cindy was on, I loved Cindy's ideas that Shakespeare just keeps revisiting the same basic story and doing like, well, what if we did this this time? And what if we did this this time? Well, I caught this time that Benedict's actually from Padua and Padua is where Taming of the Shrew is set.
- [26:04]
Thomas Banks
Yes.
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Angelina Stanford
So that's quite a nod to connect. Connect these two plays, they're both also Italian plays, and they both also. About two couples, an A couple and a B couple, and the kind of sparky war between them. So the backdrop for scene one, act one, is that there has been a war, and Don Pedro is the leader. Leader of a kingdom. He's a duke. Is he a duke?
- [26:31]
Thomas Banks
Don Pedro, he is the Prince of Aragon. The Prince Aragon is in Spain. And by the way, actually, if. If this is confusing, wait, it's an Italian play, but Don Pedro is Spanish. Spain actually ruled over Sicily, which is where Messina is. So, yeah, this would all have been current politics in Shakespeare's time. So it makes.
- [26:50]
Angelina Stanford
I also read a commentary that said this would have been sort of a nod of a medieval kingdom because it's set in the past. Shakespeare doesn't set any of his stuff, almost none of his stuff, contemporarily.
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Thomas Banks
And we don't really need to know anything about the war except that Don Pedro and his brother, Don John were on opposite sides.
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Angelina Stanford
Well, that's what we need to know. That there has been. He was a rebel. So Don John rebelled against his brother. Don Pedro was defeated and forgiven and brought back into the fold also.
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Thomas Banks
And Don Pedro and Don John are not full brothers.
- [27:20]
Angelina Stanford
Correct.
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Thomas Banks
They're half brothers. Don John is the illegitimate half brother of Don Pedro, the legitimate prince.
- [27:26]
Angelina Stanford
This will become significant to the audience at least. And also I'll explain why.
- [27:31]
Thomas Banks
Also, have you ever seen a modern version of this? That makes way too much about the war. I've actually. I've seen a version of this that began with a battle.
- [27:41]
Angelina Stanford
Oh.
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Thomas Banks
In which, like, people are actually dying and there's explosions on the field. And, like. Yeah, the different guys are all, you know, in, like, you know, and what?
- [27:51]
Angelina Stanford
Seriously, ptsd. Now that's their problem. Yeah.
- [27:54]
Thomas Banks
Another one. Okay, I could go on. No, I could go on.
- [27:56]
Angelina Stanford
Like, seriously, like, that's making that cycle.
- [27:58]
Thomas Banks
Making it too much. Yeah. Like, so this is not really a play rooted in history, but I've seen another version which was set in. I think it was like, Medina, Maryland, at the end of the American Civil War. And everyone is like, so. Like, the victorious Don Pedro, who is a Yankee, of course, with, you know, the others are coming home. And Don John, of course. I think they even had him say, the south will rise again at one point. And it was. It was ridiculous. But, yeah, I've seen some.
- [28:29]
Angelina Stanford
We can't have nice things.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, this is.
- [28:32]
Angelina Stanford
This is as ridiculous as the.
- [28:33]
Thomas Banks
Don John is also a racist. Yeah.
- [28:35]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. But I'm just gonna start with, you know, we're gonna remake Home Alone. And we're gonna start off. The opening scene is with the robbers, and they just got the foreclosure note, and it's Christmas and he's gonna lose his house. And now we're gonna root like, come on. That changes everything. Just ruins it. Because the whole point of this play is. And Shakespeare makes it very clear, the time of war is over. And so now we turn our attention to love. Naturally, that's everything in scene one.
- [28:59]
Thomas Banks
I survived a war. Let me get married now.
- [29:01]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. You've put it behind you. So he's forgiven. And now, honestly, I do hear. No, no, let me finish before you say. Anyway, you're doing just what you said these guys are not supposed to do, or.
- [29:12]
Thomas Banks
There are no blunt instruments near me.
- [29:14]
Angelina Stanford
Always just my pins. Yeah, the pin is mightier than the sword. But there's a little bit of an echo of Macbeth because Macbeth opens also with a rebel has just been put down.
- [29:28]
Thomas Banks
No, no, that's. No, that's correct.
- [29:30]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, but this is the comic version of that, because in Macbeth, the rebel is executed. And here he's forgiven.
- [29:37]
Thomas Banks
And he's a snake in the grass.
- [29:38]
Angelina Stanford
He's a snake in the grass. So he's forgiven, but he's not happy about it. He's quite sullen, and he's. So. He's just looking to cause trouble. But we'll take a look.
- [29:45]
Thomas Banks
One thing he does have in common with some of Shakespeare's greatest villains. The Iago's. The Edmonds. He's a malcontent.
- [29:51]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I see a lot of.
- [29:53]
Thomas Banks
He's not happy with. With his estate in life and the universe.
- [29:57]
Angelina Stanford
Chapter nine, as we'll see in just a minute. Okay, so it opens with a messenger comes and says, hey, these guys are coming. And there was this great battle, and this young Soldier, he's new to Don Pedro's retinue, has really distinguished himself, and he basically single handedly puts Don John in his place. And then because I adore her so much, Beatrice just bursts on the scene and said, any news of Senor Montanto?
- [30:29]
Thomas Banks
Okay. And that actually. Okay, here's something. I want you to try this on. I think at the beginning of this play, Benedick and Beatrice are kind of in love and just don't want to ignore.
- [30:38]
Angelina Stanford
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [30:40]
Thomas Banks
Because, I mean, she asked sarcastically. And Montanto, by the way, is a. It's kind of hard to translate. It's a fencing term. Yeah. So it would be like. And did Rambo get back from the war? So she's ironically saying that. Yes, she's saying that he's really not that heroic, but he likes to think of himself as macho.
- [30:56]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. They're like, well, Claudio distinguished himself. And she's like, oh, how many people did Benedict kill? I will eat all of the ones he killed. Meaning he didn't kill anyone. Yeah. What's. And so you're right. They burst onto the scene with this merry war. We're told, don't ignore my niece. But she is.
- [31:12]
Thomas Banks
I think it shows that she is anxious to know that he's safe.
- [31:14]
Angelina Stanford
She's absolutely anxious. That was my point. Like, they both, they see each other and they're immediately, immediately they're just that couple.
- [31:20]
Thomas Banks
Not if each notices in the crowd.
- [31:23]
Angelina Stanford
And yet if you track every scene, they can't stop talking about each other.
- [31:28]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [31:29]
Angelina Stanford
Everything out of their mouth. Everything out of the mouth. Beatrice, like, so what about Benedict? Not that I care. And then Benedict shows up, she runs on him, oh, it's you again. And he's like, oh, it's you again. And even, even when Claudio's like, did you see hero? And. And Benedict response, well, she's not as good looking as Beatrice.
- [31:47]
Thomas Banks
Oh, we should talk about their names.
- [31:49]
Angelina Stanford
No, no, I'm coming, I'm coming to that. But I was just laying this out, that there is plenty to suggest that they are in love, but don't want to admit it to themselves because something.
- [31:59]
Thomas Banks
Happened, something happened in the past.
- [32:01]
Angelina Stanford
There's at least two lines that suggest they were previously involved or were interested and it didn't quite come off. Maybe there had been some expectations of marriage and it didn't come off. And now. So now they're at this Mary war. Now they're at each other's throat threats.
- [32:14]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [32:15]
Angelina Stanford
When she says, I know you of old, you know, yeah.
- [32:18]
Thomas Banks
You Always end with a jade trick.
- [32:20]
Angelina Stanford
I know you of old, right?
- [32:21]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. And a jade is a. An unreliable horse.
- [32:24]
Angelina Stanford
An unreliable horse. And basically, you don't. You don't finish. You don't cross the finish line. Benedict.
- [32:28]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [32:29]
Angelina Stanford
You don't cross the finish line. I know you have old. You start off strong, and you don't fit. So something has happened.
- [32:33]
Thomas Banks
I think also one of the notes I read on that particular line, the jades trick, it could be a horse that might throw its master because it's old, it's weary, and it doesn't want to bear the burden of a rider anymore. So it's kind of a treacherous horse, if you will.
- [32:51]
Angelina Stanford
Well, okay, that fits with a number of the places where she says. She keeps making the point. He's changeable. Oh, who's Benedict's favorite now? Because his loyalty's changed with the fashion. He's always switching hats. Like, she's constantly green.
- [33:04]
Thomas Banks
Benedict, for his part, he's always talking about women's treachery and disloyalty. The first thing he says, remember his first line. His first spoken line is when Leonato is introducing his daughter Hero and says, this is. What does he say? Her mother hath many times told her so. And he says.
- [33:25]
Angelina Stanford
He says, is this your daughter? And he says, well, her mother has told me so.
- [33:28]
Thomas Banks
And Benedict comes back with, were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her? Which is like, really?
- [33:32]
Angelina Stanford
Wait. Leonato comes back and says, oh, no, because you were just a child at the time.
- [33:37]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Wow. Seriously. So. But yeah, like, Benedict keeps recurring, like, so many of his jokes deal with women cheating.
- [33:43]
Angelina Stanford
Yep. So they clearly.
- [33:45]
Thomas Banks
And when he says he will die a bachelor, I mean, he gives the answer that, you know, because I don't want to have horns on my head.
- [33:50]
Angelina Stanford
I want to be cuckolded.
- [33:51]
Thomas Banks
So, I mean, he's joking about it, but it also seems to be a weird obsession with him.
- [33:55]
Angelina Stanford
No, it is a weird obsession.
- [33:56]
Thomas Banks
So each of them thinks that the other is inconstant, not unfaithful.
- [34:01]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. And so this is what is stopping them. That's right. But it's clear that they're in love with each other. I mean, Don Pedro is going to ask Beatrice right here in the first act, you know, will you marry me? And she says, no. And then she's like, oh, is that Benedict over there? Like, they're just. They're just obsessed with each other. And this is just so geniusly done. We should probably also mention that this witty banter, this has a name Stick a Mafia. And Shakespeare is just the master, the absolute master of this. This. This really rapid fire, you know, my girl Friday kind of rapid fire.
- [34:35]
Thomas Banks
His Girl Friday.
- [34:35]
Angelina Stanford
His Girl Friday. His Girl Friday. Or you wanted to mention their names.
- [34:39]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. So their names not just beginning with the same letter, but actually mean basically the same thing. Because Benedict comes from the Latin benedictus, which is blessed or fortunate, and Beatrice, also blessed or fortunate.
- [34:55]
Angelina Stanford
And it's very clear that they're set up as mirrors of each other.
- [34:58]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [34:59]
Angelina Stanford
So they're made for each other and everybody can see it.
- [35:02]
Thomas Banks
But can you talk also? Because I don't remember all the details about this, but you told me that Hero, that her name also is loaded with some kind of symbolic.
- [35:11]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so I did say hero a little minute ago because I got self conscious about the fact that I don't actually say hero. You say hero. The audio says hero.
- [35:20]
Thomas Banks
I've always heard hero.
- [35:22]
Angelina Stanford
Version is hero. Dr. Feels said it was Hero and that her version was the name of Hera.
- [35:29]
Thomas Banks
All right, all right.
- [35:30]
Angelina Stanford
So the goddess.
- [35:31]
Thomas Banks
The goddess Hera, the Queen of the Gods.
- [35:33]
Angelina Stanford
Which, considering that this is all going to be a big play about trying to make somebody jealous, kind of kind of fits. So we have our setup here, and Shakespeare loves to do this. We have an A couple and a B couple. So the A couple is Claudio and Harrow, and the B couple is Benedict and Beatrice. Much Ado About Nothing. I mean, I'm sorry, A Taming of the Shrew. We have Catherine and Petruchio, and we have Lucentio and Bianca over and over, you know, Midsummer Night's Dream, et cetera, et cetera. He loves his A couple and his B couple, and we're gonna have to see what he does with that because he does a little bit something different in each play, and I love what he does here. But one of the things that is quite remarkable about Much Ado About Nothing is that the A couple is Claudio and Hera. And this. And. And the subplot is supposed to be Benedict and Beatrice, but they steal the show. They absolutely steal the show. WH Auden has a really good essay, though, where he says that some people have thought they stole the show so much they tried to retell it without the Claudio and Harrow storyline. And that it didn't work, that it's not enough by itself that it actually needs the counterpoint of the other story.
- [36:38]
Thomas Banks
So he means Shakespeare's play has been staged without Claudio and Hero. Yeah, I would think that would make nonsense of the play.
- [36:45]
Angelina Stanford
It would.
- [36:46]
Thomas Banks
Wow.
- [36:47]
Angelina Stanford
It would.
- [36:47]
Thomas Banks
I mean, as boring as they are, they are kind of necessary for just the architecture of the play.
- [36:53]
Angelina Stanford
So, right in scene one, we see the character of Claudio being built up. Right. He's shown himself well on the battlefield. But of course it's good his character is going to be torn down later because we know at the end of these two acts we read together that Don John is. Well, he's out to get this guy. He wants to cause trouble because he brought him down. The other thing. Okay, let me just say this because Shakespeare, this is true of almost all of his comedies. Almost all of them. And this was something Dr. Fields taught me. And so I'm going to throw this out here as a way. This is a really, really good lens for going into almost any Shakespeare comedy. So this will be a little different than we talked about with some of the other comedies. But Shakespeare loves to present two extremes and then basically argue neither extreme is correct. And so what he does in this play is something he does in a lot of plays is he presents us with an ultra romantic couple and then an anti romantic couple and then we'll have to see what he's going to do with them. So right off the bat we see obviously who's the anti romantic couple. The two characters going around saying, not if you were the last person on earth, I am never getting married. Marriages for idiots. I'm not getting married. Right. So they're, they're that couple. And we've watched enough rom coms. We know totally what's going to happen to them because it's. What always happens to them is. Yet you're going to see that Shakespeare elevates it. This is not just a love story. This is. There's going to be a whole lot else going on.
- [38:17]
Thomas Banks
What is the first example of a couple who can't stand each other and fall in love? I actually can't think of any before Shakespeare. Shakespeare before Shakespeare.
- [38:26]
Angelina Stanford
Before Shakespeare. I don't know.
- [38:29]
Thomas Banks
I don't know that there is any there. No, you're like, like canonical texts. I, I don't know that you're not.
- [38:36]
Angelina Stanford
No, the Roman plays are much more that they like each other.
- [38:38]
Thomas Banks
They're lovey dovey, but the parents are keeping them apart.
- [38:43]
Angelina Stanford
Well, okay, no, there are some. Well, there's the treacherous maiden, the perilous maiden trope in fairy tales. So that's the girl Catherine taming in the Shrew is one of them. But there's a reference to it in Beowulf. And Tolkien points out that this is a Folk. Folk trope. Folklore trope. So this is the maiden who. The fairy tale maiden that all the guys come to try to win her hand and she's like, don't even look at. Yes, Atalanta. That's what it's based on. And so she, she says no to all of them and then ultimately is.
- [39:13]
Thomas Banks
Won over and becomes by some device. Often I would say that's different though. I mean it's, it's related, but the.
- [39:19]
Angelina Stanford
Closest I can think of. Yeah, I hear what you say. It's like that spark of mutual attraction.
- [39:24]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Where it's obvious that these two are going to end up married.
- [39:27]
Angelina Stanford
But you might be right. Maybe.
- [39:29]
Thomas Banks
I think Shakespeare might have kind of made that his own.
- [39:32]
Angelina Stanford
I love that idea. Yeah, I love that idea. So the a couple here, Claudio and Harrow, are the ones who are the ultra romantic couple because they fall in love at first sight and that they're about to see what's going to happen.
- [39:46]
Thomas Banks
And their courtship also is. He almost kind of goes out of his way to make it more conventional and a marriage of convenience than he needs to.
- [39:57]
Angelina Stanford
But I like that you bring that up. I'll bring that up more later because Auden has a lot to say about that. This play is about convention because Claudio.
- [40:05]
Thomas Banks
When he first mentions hero or hero, he says, hath Leonato any son? So she's gonna get like his money in the state when he dies. Which is actually. I mean, it's not like a boorish question to ask. And that would be a normal question for a prospective suitor of his class to inquire about. But again, it's almost making him more boring than he needs to be.
- [40:29]
Angelina Stanford
So one of the things I like to pay attention in any Shakespeare play is when is Shakespeare using poetry and when does he have the characters speaking prose? And one of the things I love about this play, and we'll see how this goes as we carry on through the play. But in the first two acts, it's our ultra romantic couple, Claudio and Hera, who speak in poetry and our anti romantic couple who only speaks in prose to each other.
- [40:54]
Thomas Banks
That's true. Benedick and Beatrice speak almost not at all in verse. That's true.
- [41:00]
Angelina Stanford
Because they're not getting sucked up into love, right?
- [41:04]
Thomas Banks
Oh no.
- [41:05]
Angelina Stanford
Both of them see themselves as a hard nosed realist.
- [41:08]
Thomas Banks
Yes.
- [41:08]
Angelina Stanford
Right. So when Beatrice is like, well, yeah, yeah, it's all love. Everything's great at first, but then. But then you're married for a while and it all goes away. And Benedict, of course, is taking the position which would have been quite common in the Renaissance. Yeah, yeah. Fall in love, open your heart to a woman and she's just gonna cuckold.
- [41:23]
Thomas Banks
You and rule over you as well.
- [41:27]
Angelina Stanford
Really would like to see the word cuckolding come back.
- [41:29]
Thomas Banks
What a great word that is.
- [41:31]
Angelina Stanford
It's much better than I got cheated on. So I should point out too, because this will have something to do with what Shakespeare is doing. In the pre modern world. The assumption about who's faithful out of a man or a woman is actually quite different than our expectations.
- [41:47]
Thomas Banks
We kind of expect the guy to be the first one to cheat, but it's kind of reversed back then.
- [41:52]
Angelina Stanford
Song out there on the radio, right. As some dog, I loved him faithfully. And some lion cheating dog player, you know, broke my heart and. But in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it goes in the other direction. This will help you to make sense of. Like John Donne's poems and Shakespeare sonnets. The assumption is that it is the man who can love faithfully and the woman who's coy and will play with him and who will be inconstant. So women's inconstancy, that's a poem by John Donne. But that's a theme that comes up a lot in Shakespeare sonnets, in poetry.
- [42:23]
Thomas Banks
In folk ballads, I mean in opera. La Donne mobile.
- [42:27]
Angelina Stanford
Right.
- [42:27]
Thomas Banks
Woman is unsteady. Yeah, right.
- [42:31]
Angelina Stanford
There's a lot of reasons for that. She's ruled by the moon. Her body is ruled by the moon. And the moon is changeable. And thus a woman is changeable.
- [42:40]
Thomas Banks
Actually, John, I mean, this is not light poetry or anything like that. But John Knox in his immortal and brilliantly titled the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women makes that one of his arguments that women are.
- [42:56]
Angelina Stanford
Great title, horrible argument.
- [42:58]
Thomas Banks
Just to be clear, he says women are. I do not remember the wording. But since they are not mistress of their appetites, they are intemperate and more easily led astray by various appetites. I think he mainly means lust than men. So that's why you can't trust them with the rule of states. Unlike Henry viii, who is so chaste.
- [43:18]
Angelina Stanford
And is that women cheat, Women are inconstant, women are unfaithful. You see Benedict being very worried about this. But this also helps to explain why at the end of Act 2, Don John's plan is we will make Claudio think Hera has been unfaithful.
- [43:34]
Thomas Banks
Right.
- [43:36]
Angelina Stanford
Now, once you understand that, that's the expectation. You see how much Shakespeare subverts that in so many of his sonnets in play because he will consistently say, no, men and women can be unfaithful. It's not just women.
- [43:49]
Thomas Banks
He even introduces a song in the middle of this about men's inconstancy. Yeah, that.
- [43:54]
Angelina Stanford
We'll come to that. Because, of course, you know, we'll almost. Almost set a spoiler for act three. Nope. We'll just wait. We're doing act two. Okay. So we've got the couples out, and everyone just sort of delights in Benedict and Beatrice's chemistry and fire and their merry war. No one's taking this seriously. They're all laughing. Basically. Beatrice says, not if he was the last man on earth, which we know is famous last words. And he basically says the same thing. I mean, I just. I just love all of this so much. We probably should read some of this. I love it, though, because, like, they can't stop talking about each other and they can't stop talking to each other. I love this line on 115. I wonder that you will still be talking, Senor Benedict, Nobody marks you. She goes over to him to talk to him about the fact that no one's talking to him. Like she. They're so obsessed with each other.
- [44:53]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. And he, for his part, whenever another subject is brought up for discussion. For instance, when Claudio asks him his opinion of Harrow, even then he brings up Beatrice. Yeah.
- [45:07]
Angelina Stanford
He's not as good looking as Beatrice.
- [45:08]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. He says. He says, what is this? She's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair place, and et cetera, et cetera. I do not like her. And then he says, there's her cousin who doth outshine her, whatever it is, as the 1st May doth the last of December. So it's like. Yeah, like, who is really pretty? Oh, yes, that woman I can't stand. And I can't stop talking about, like, she's so beautiful.
- [45:28]
Angelina Stanford
But, you know. Oh, God help us all. It's kind of that kind of comment. But we'll look at that. But we should read some of this.
- [45:33]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, absolutely.
- [45:34]
Angelina Stanford
Let's start with line 116. I'm reading out the Riverside. If you're following along at home, your line numbers might be a little bit different, but this is. So Benedict has entered, and Beatrice starts with, I wonder that you shall still be talking. Did you find it?
- [45:48]
Thomas Banks
Yes.
- [45:49]
Angelina Stanford
I wonder that you will still be talking. Senor Benedict, nobody marks you.
- [45:54]
Thomas Banks
What, my dear lady Disdain. Are you yet living?
- [45:57]
Angelina Stanford
Is it possible disdain should die while she has such meat food defeated as Senor Benedict, courtesy itself must convert to disdain if you come in her presence.
- [46:06]
Thomas Banks
Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted. And I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none.
- [46:18]
Angelina Stanford
A dear happiness to women. They would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood I am of your humour for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swears he loves me.
- [46:30]
Thomas Banks
God keep your ladyship still in that mind, so some gentleman or other shall scape a predestinate scratched face.
- [46:36]
Angelina Stanford
Scratching could not make it worse. Worse. And twere such a face as yours were.
- [46:40]
Thomas Banks
Well, you are a rare parrot, teacher.
- [46:43]
Angelina Stanford
A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
- [46:46]
Thomas Banks
I would my horse had the speed of your tongue and so good a continuer. But keep your way in God's name. I have done.
- [46:52]
Angelina Stanford
You always end with a jade's trick. I know you of old. Oh, the heat, the fire so much. Benedict and Beatrice are number two in my all time favorite literary couples.
- [47:05]
Thomas Banks
Oh, I wonder who the first is.
- [47:08]
Angelina Stanford
Are you being sarcastic? No, Lord Peter. Lord Peter?
- [47:11]
Thomas Banks
No, no, I. I was being sarcastic.
- [47:13]
Angelina Stanford
But number three is Lizzie and Darcy.
- [47:15]
Thomas Banks
You have figurines of Lord Peter and Harriet right over here.
- [47:19]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I do. I do. My little altar to them. But I'm glad actually that we brought up Lizzie and Mr. Darcy. I'm teaching Pride and Prejudice right now and. And Pride and Prejudice is Much Ado about next. That's what you do about nothing. Jane Austen is very Shakespearean in the way that she approaches that. And you see Shakespeare's influence on her so much. And so just like with Much Ado About Nothing, you have an A couple and a B couple. You have the A couple of Jane and Mr. Bingley who fall in love at first sight, basically. And then you have Mr. Darcy and Lizzie who are basically like, not if you were the last person on earth.
- [47:55]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, no, that's. That's very true. I don't think I had ever thought of that until you pointed it out to me, by the way.
- [48:01]
Angelina Stanford
Well, you know me. It's what I do. I like to see how all the stories connect. So then they kind of move away. And Claudio's like, benedict, did you see that young chick? And he's like, no, I wasn't even looking at her. Of course he was. And he's looking at Beatrice. He can't Stop looking at Beatrice. And. And he says, what do you think? And Benedict says, are you thinking about buying her? You're asking so much about her. Like, he's just, oh, yeah.
- [48:26]
Thomas Banks
And he says, can the world buy such a jewel? He said, yes, and a case, to put it. God, what a great line.
- [48:33]
Angelina Stanford
You know, he's so. He's just so skeptical.
- [48:35]
Thomas Banks
There's something of Bingo Little about Claudio.
- [48:38]
Angelina Stanford
So glad you said that. So in Taming of the Shrew, Lucy, I always, to my class, read Licentio's lines in the voice of being little. Like, it's just like, is it? Oh, Jeeves, she's an angel. And Lucentio actually says that just like that. Shakespeare always brings up that again, because he's not copying PG Wodehouse, but because PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare are both copying Plautus, the Roman playwright. You always have that guy who's just struck down, who falls in love at first sight. And again, you're gonna ruin this play if you're like, he doesn't even know her. How can they be in love? Well, have you read a P.G. woodhouse story? Bingo Little falls in love every time he turns around. That's the comedy. This is. This is what's funny. Jane and Mr. Bingley fall in love after having danced a couple times. Like, this is. Is just how these stories happens. Yeah. These are how these stories work. This is also good, Claudio. In mine eyes, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on, Benedict said, and I can see yet without spectacles. And I see no such matter. There's her cousin, if she were not possessed with a fury exceeds her as much in beauty as the first of May, death of the last of December. But I hope you have no intent to turn husband. Have you? He says, yes, yes. Oh, no. It comes to this. And he. And I love that. He's like kids today. Everybody's just running off and getting married. I'm never again gonna see a bachelor of some years. All you guys are running off and getting married. This is terrible. All right, so then Don Pedro comes in, checking my notes.
- [50:13]
Thomas Banks
Something I thought of. You see here, there's actually a bit. Not a whole lot, but there's a bit of pressure on Beatrice, you know, by her family members, her uncle and cousin, to like, you know, get over your.
- [50:25]
Angelina Stanford
Lighten up.
- [50:26]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Hatred of men. You know, guys won't like you if you don't smile. There's a little bit of that. It seems that everyone has written Benedick off as. Yeah, he's Just that guy who's never going to get married. Yeah, there seems to be something of that.
- [50:38]
Angelina Stanford
Yep, yep. All right, so Don Pedro comes in and he starts talking. Of course they're all talking. Right. So Leonato and. And Claudio and Don Pedro, and they kind of arrange it all with the dad, like, if she's willing. Yes, let's do it. And so Don. And again, to us, this seems very strange. This is highly unrealistic, and yet this is a comedy story. And it is. It works perfectly well in stories. Don Pedro says, here's a plan. I'm going to put on a disguise, and I'm going to pretend to be you, and I'm going to woo Harrow for you. Now, in terms of the plot, we have the first of our trick scenes. Somebody pretending to be somebody else. But the tricking here is for a good purpose. This is going to be contrasted in just a second to some tricking for some bad purposes. But in terms of storytelling, we actually have this kind of trope a whole lot. This is Cyrano de Bergerac, actually, in.
- [51:33]
Thomas Banks
Othello also, that we don't see Othello's Courtship of. Of Desdemona. We know that Cassio, who later will be suspected by him, had come as an intermediary to speak on Othello's behalf. So Shakespeare uses this or something like it more than once.
- [51:49]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Being so much like Iago. Again, like a comic version of it. It just. It fits Cindy's thesis that Shakespeare just keeps revisiting these things. And so Othello's kind of like the same story, but it takes a tragic turn.
- [52:02]
Thomas Banks
Sure, absolutely.
- [52:03]
Angelina Stanford
All right, so in scene two, we see the first kerfuffle about eavesdropping. So the uncle has been eavesdropping Antonio.
- [52:18]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [52:18]
Angelina Stanford
On the plan.
- [52:19]
Thomas Banks
And he misheard one or two things.
- [52:21]
Angelina Stanford
So Don Pedro is saying, I am going to woo Harrow for you, Claudio and Antonio. Misunderstanding.
- [52:27]
Thomas Banks
I'm going to woo Harrow, period.
- [52:29]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, it's like, guess what? The prince.
- [52:31]
Thomas Banks
Which is great. I mean, right? Because. Yeah, yeah, you're gonna marry royalty.
- [52:36]
Angelina Stanford
All right, so scene three, then Conrad comes in to talk to Don Jon.
- [52:41]
Thomas Banks
And Don John basically says, I'm the bad guy and I'm just gonna act like a bad guy. I have no reason to do so. But, I mean, that's my job in this play, for crying out loud. You could almost have him, like, break the fourth wall here and explain this to the audience. I'm wearing a black hat. Look, I'm wearing a black hat.
- [52:59]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I love that.
- [53:00]
Thomas Banks
I have a mustache that I'm twisting.
- [53:02]
Angelina Stanford
You know, at the same time, there are things that are said here that the audience would have immediately understood. First of all, he's illegitimate. He's a bastard. So when you understand that in the Elizabethan cosmology, things being natural or unnatural have very significant import, then you. You can see that him being illegitimate, therefore unnatural, therefore he's going to act unnaturally. So this would all be very consistent with his character. And we also then see the idea that he's saturnine. Now he's saying Conrad is saturnine. But somebody, I think it's Harrow later, who says, he's very melancholy.
- [53:39]
Thomas Banks
And Beatrice. Beatrice said that I never look at him, but I am heartburn for an hour afterwards. Which means that he's kind of sour. Yeah, yeah. Like, I feel like I have indigestion after I look at him.
- [53:50]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. So those things would have immediately. The audience would have known that also.
- [53:54]
Thomas Banks
One of his sidekicks, his two henchmen, he has Conrad and then Borachio. The name borachio means wine skin in Italian. So he's basically. He's drunk and slob. If you have a sidekick named Drunken Slob. Yeah. Again, people might react to you in a certain way.
- [54:12]
Angelina Stanford
Again, I go back to home alone. Like, you don't sit around and ask, why are these guys trying to break in? Well, they're the robbers. And so that's what robbers do. They try to break in. And that's fine. But I do want to touch on the idea that he's being ruled by Saturn. Modern audiences are very confused by this. Our only understanding of the stars having any kind of significance is like modern horoscopes. That's not what this is. CS Lewis handles this very, very well in a chapter in the Discarded Image to talk about planetary influences, which is not the same thing as a horoscope, but definitely the belief that each of the planets has a certain set of traits. And whichever planet would have been in an ascendancy when you were born, you know, like the rain coming down or the sunshine, it would have interacted with your natural soil to produce different things. And so if somebody is mercurial in Shakespeare, they would be, you know, changeable, happy, but changeable and volatile. Right. Somebody under Venus is obviously going to be ruled by love. Somebody.
- [55:14]
Thomas Banks
Mars is going to be, you know, bellicose and warlike. Him.
- [55:19]
Angelina Stanford
So Jupiter, it was considered most fortunate to be born under Jupiter. Jove. The word is Jove. That's where we get the word jovial.
- [55:27]
Thomas Banks
Cheerful Mary.
- [55:27]
Angelina Stanford
So you get very merry, very good natured. But Saturn is the opposite of Jupiter and it's the slowest moving of the planets, and it's named for a particularly ancient God. Those born under his influence are therefore saturnine. That is grave, gloomy and slow. I'm getting these notes, by the way, out of the Isaac Asimov commentary on Shakespeare. Now, for us, it's like, that's so ridiculous. He's born under Saturn, so he's like depressing and gloomy and up to no good. But we do the same thing. We'll open a story and be like, this guy's bipolar or he's depressed. And then for the rest of the show we're just like, oh, yeah, he's.
- [56:10]
Thomas Banks
Let me give you these characters. Enneagrams.
- [56:12]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, well, pretty much.
- [56:14]
Thomas Banks
I guess enneagrams are out of fashion now, are they? I think so. I can't keep up either sides here.
- [56:20]
Angelina Stanford
But yeah, it's the same sort of thing. And so he's got some fantastic speeches here. So let's take a look at. Actually, would you. Would you want to read the two Don John speeches? I don't want to be the villain, certainly. Okay, so you can read this.
- [56:33]
Thomas Banks
I'm Better at Being Saturnine.
- [56:34]
Angelina Stanford
You are this one and this one, Sure.
- [56:39]
Thomas Banks
I wonder that thou, being as thou say'st, thou art born under Saturn, go'st about to apply a mortal medicine to a mortifying mischief. I cannot hide what I am. I must be sad when I have cause and smile at no man's jests. Eat when I have stomach and wait for no man's leisure. Sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business, Laugh when I am merry, and claw no man in his humor. I have to do it my way. Basically, I went there. I went there and then talking about the resentment he feels towards his brother. I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace. And it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any. In this, though I cannot be said to be a flattering, honest man, it must not be denied, but I am a plain dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog. And therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth I would bite. If I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.
- [57:53]
Angelina Stanford
All right, so I am what I am. I'M the villain, and so I'm gonna go cause mischief. And honestly, there's a lot here that is going to show up later in John Milton's Paradise Lost with the character of Satan. Very similar.
- [58:06]
Thomas Banks
This odd combination of self reflection and impenitence.
- [58:10]
Angelina Stanford
No, exactly. Where. Where Satan says, well, I blew it and I got myself kicked out. And that's tough. I can't get back in, so I might as well just cause as much trouble as I possibly can.
- [58:21]
Thomas Banks
To reign is worth ambition, though, in hell.
- [58:23]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly so. Exactly so.
- [58:25]
Thomas Banks
So could be a bumper sticker.
- [58:26]
Angelina Stanford
So Don John is that sort of character. Now, of course, I'm reminded there are certain kinds of readers out there who think it's their job to pass judgment on whether or not things are successfully executed by.
- [58:41]
Thomas Banks
I do that all the time. I preach against it to some extent, but I do it all the time.
- [58:46]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, well, that is not my view, as you know. And what's. But you say that, but you would never do what I'm about to say.
- [58:53]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [58:53]
Angelina Stanford
I've been married to you a long time. You've never said something like this. I was on a podcast once where we were discussing this play, and the host of the podcast actually said, Shakespeare doesn't give any motivation to Don John for what he does. Do you feel like this is a flaw in the play?
- [59:10]
Thomas Banks
Oh, no, I wouldn't do that.
- [59:11]
Angelina Stanford
No, of course you wouldn't do that. I was shocked and mad and outraged and just like, what? What?
- [59:18]
Thomas Banks
In a different type of story, a villain that has no motive might not work as well. But I think in this type of comic. Yeah, like, it would darken the mood too much if we went into.
- [59:28]
Angelina Stanford
And again, going back to our Home Alone example, if you give a great big motivation to the robbers, other than the only motivation we have is they're robbers, therefore they're robbing. Okay. If you give them too much motivation, it makes. It undermines the comedy. It becomes too dark that it works much better, that Don John is just looking to cause some mischief however he can. And so in this case, he hears there's going to be a little romance going. Don Pedro is going to go woo a hero for Claudia. So he decides to start some trouble by going over to Claudio and saying, he stabbed you in the back, man, and he's going to get your girl for himself. So in this first section, we have the good trickery, right? So that's Don Pedro gonna do a trick. Say trick. It's a disguise. He's gonna have a disguise. And he's going to woo Harrow for Claudia, but it's still a disguise. Things are not going to be as they actually are. And then we have the bad version of that with Don John, as this is a miniature version of what's going to become a big version. Act two and act three. All right, act two. So act two, they're at a dance. So I want to talk a little.
- [60:46]
Thomas Banks
Bit about a mask.
- [60:47]
Angelina Stanford
Indeed, a mask. Okay, a mask. So everybody's wearing different things. Of course, Beatrice can recognize Benedict. She knows his body, how he moves, how he holds himself. But she pretends not to know who he is just to mess with him. And it gets him so mad that he's going around going, how could she not know me? How could she not know me? They are so obsessed with each other.
- [61:05]
Thomas Banks
I think he's not even entirely certain. He says, she could know me and not know me. And also, it's like she completely misunderstands me too. And. And when she says. She describes him as the prince's fool, the prince's jester.
- [61:17]
Angelina Stanford
It's so.
- [61:17]
Thomas Banks
And then she says, and what does he say? His only species of wit is devising impossible slanders. And then men laugh at him and beat him. So he's not even a really good jester. But, you know, people put up with him because, you know, he's like that guy. He's like that friend in the group of friends that everybody. Everyone. No one really respects, but everyone puts up with.
- [61:35]
Angelina Stanford
I know. And after. After she walks away, he's like, was. Did she know it was me and she's just messing with me? Or did she not know it was me and she. That's really her opinion.
- [61:43]
Thomas Banks
What's great also is that he acknowledges that he is kind of a clown. He says, what? What? Because I have wit, it's like, yeah, I'm funny, right? So, sure, I'm maybe kind of a clown, but I'm not a bad clown. I'm good at what I do. Yeah.
- [61:57]
Angelina Stanford
Play so much. I love this place so much. So let's talk a little bit about music and dancing in Elizabethan cos. Yeah, I think we can get through this first scene in Act 2 and maybe wrap it up here. All right, so let's think about it this way. We pers. We imagine that we live in a very fragmented, disconnected universe. Right? The things that I do and the things that you do don't affect each other. Right. You do you is our motto these days. And as if everything you can do will affect only yourself and have no greater effect. We look into the night sky, we see randomness. We see a nothingness and an emptiness, and we don't see any great design to anything. We constantly talk about, oh, this is just random. Everything's just random. I'm random. The most extremes, examples of that come with social media posts of, well, nothing I do matters anyway. We're just, you know, atoms floating around on rocks in space and nothing means anything. Now, over and against that is the pre modern view, which is that you live in a divinely ordered universe, and this divinely ordered universe is harmonious. So you think back to something like the music of the spheres. This is a beautiful metaphor to explain that you live in a harmonious universe. So not only is it orderly that each planet is in its order, but that that order is musical. Right? It's harmonious. God is working together. And so in Renaissance and medieval literature, you see music and dancing are two huge metaphors. And in music in particular, you can look for who is in tune and who is out of tune. So last week, when Mr. Banks read Ulysses Soliloquy from Troilus and Cressida, where he said, untune that string and hark, what discord follows. That is type tying into the. To the music metaphor, particularly in medieval literature, you'll notice a great use of the harp. So the harp becomes the instrument by which the story is tuned or untuned. The characters are tuned or untuned and becomes a really important image. So that's music. Dance is going to function in a similar way. So not only are the planets harmoniously moving around like musical notes, but they're also dancing with each other. And so you have the idea of the great dance or the cosmic dance to understand that properly, we have to get out of our minds any kind of modern dancing of people just like, you know, flopping around and gyrating in a very individualistic manner. Think back to something like the Virginia Rio, like Jane Austen style dancing.
- [64:29]
Thomas Banks
So they didn't take ecstasy before coming to this dance with like some kind of. In some sort of club with purple strobe light.
- [64:35]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, now I really just want to reshoot this whole scene like it's a rave. Like.
- [64:39]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, yeah, I think, okay. Of all the Shakespeare plays that you kind of can take and put in a modern world, I think you could never do that with this one. Another people. Not that people haven't tried, but that's the thing. I. I'm aware of certain attempts to put this in contemporary 21st century, but just the, the Laws. Well, well, okay. For one thing. Well, I can't say right now without giving away too much.
- [65:04]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, well. But we can maybe I'll just say.
- [65:06]
Thomas Banks
Like the rules of courtship and what men and women expect from each other in a marriage and leading up to a marriage, it just changed so much.
- [65:14]
Angelina Stanford
Similar to why so many modern adaptations of Pride and Prejudice fail, because the stakes are not the same in a modern society. And that when we. When we did our episode on movie adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, we talked about how actually one of the really good updated versions is the Bollywood version. And it's because in Indian culture, you still have that hierarchy. You still have parental expectations and parental.
- [65:39]
Thomas Banks
Involvement in who you're not legally established cast anymore, but still informal, you know.
- [65:44]
Angelina Stanford
And so sort of the pressures that the Bennett sisters are under, it translates into that culture and doesn't translate into modern American culture anymore. Yeah, no, that, that, that's fair. So let's get back to the cosmic dance. So if it's not one to one dancing, if it's group dancing, what does that mean? Okay, so let's go back to the idea of music. One of the things that it means that we're in a harmonious universe is we are part of a great cosmic choir and we're talking about like multi part choir so that everyone is singing their unique part, right? You can be the tenor, I can be the alto. We have some sopranos, we have some bass. Everybody gets to be who they are, but we do that in a way in which we're all making this beautiful music together. Right? And CS Lewis uses that image in the Magician's Nephew. Tolkien uses that image at the beginning of the Silmarillion when he's. You know, both of them have this image, God having sung the universe into existence. Right? Everybody's singing. And then of course, sin looks like the off note. The one guy who's singing the off note and trying to. Trying to pull. Pull you out of key.
- [66:52]
Thomas Banks
The guy who insists on singing that diminished fifth exactly when he shouldn't actually. The devil's interval, the diminished fifth, you can look it up.
- [67:00]
Angelina Stanford
Nice, nice. Karita somewhere is very excited right now having heard you talk about that. But what I want to point out is that it's not that everybody's exactly the same. A harmonious view of the universe allows for us each to be exactly who we are, the unique individual we are, and in such a way that we are in harmony with everyone around us. That is what the picture is. That is what Shakespeare is getting at. In the soliloquy we read last week, when he says, once you untune the strings, things that should have met together in harmony now meet in mere a pugnancy. Right. They meet to fight. So this would be like if in the symphony, you know, the violinists start punching the. You know, the flautist. Right. Like they're supposed to be working.
- [67:46]
Thomas Banks
I can use a real life example, actually. In college, in college. Well, not fighting, but I. I knew a guy who was in the university, the. The music department. One of their several choruses. I can't remember which one. And he was known for. He was the guy who was always expressing himself. And I mean, we all express ourselves from time to time. Some people should probably do it less. But he would dance while the choir was performing. I mean, he would. He would be standing with the other members of the choir, but kind of. He was dancing. Yeah, that was sort of his thing. And yeah, self expression was sort of the name of the game.
- [68:27]
Angelina Stanford
Well, that's right.
- [68:28]
Thomas Banks
I don't remember if there were consequences for this or not.
- [68:30]
Angelina Stanford
Just your eternal disdain. But I give the example in my classes of if you've ever sung in a choir, if somebody starts trying to do a solo in the middle of the choir, it throws everybody off. Like, you can't sing your part anymore. You can't be who you are because somebody else is trying to draw all the attention.
- [68:46]
Thomas Banks
Trying to do the Queen of the Night aria.
- [68:48]
Angelina Stanford
That's it.
- [68:48]
Thomas Banks
When really they're. No, you're like. Like the fifth soprano.
- [68:51]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. So everybody is in their place, being uniquely who they are, but in a way that is harmonious. When we're out of harmony, we drag everybody else out of harmony. This is again, as opposed to what I was saying earlier about the idea of you do you, right? You do you. Doesn't work if you're in a choir. If you do you. Now, I can't be me, right? You. I can't sing my part because you're drowning me out. So it's the same thing with the dance. In a group dance, you're all moving together and you're all seeing. Dancing your individual part, you're being fully who you are, but you're doing it in a way that you're moving around the other couples and it's this beautiful dance, it's this harmony. And if you're out of harmony, you're running into each other. And so when you read Shakespeare, you want to pay attention to conversations about music and dancing. And this play has a lot of Conversations about dancing.
- [69:40]
Thomas Banks
Don John is not dancing at all.
- [69:43]
Angelina Stanford
I was going to come back to that. Very. Okay. Jane Austen does this beautifully. Jane Austen has all these ballroom scenes. Pay attention. She's doing the same thing. Who's dancing? Who's not dancing? Okay. If you're dancing, you're in community. You're in harmony with the community. If you're not, you're out. Now that doesn't necessarily. It can mean you're bad, but it might just mean you're like awkward, like Mr. Darcy. Right. So who's dancing and who's not and who's dancing badly is another thing to look for. So Mr. Collins gets in there and steps all over Lizzie's feet. He can't keep time. He's all over the place. Well, that's him in a nutshell. The whole book, right. He's just stomping all over everybody. Completely not self aware. This happens in the Chronicles of Narnia. In Prince Caspian. There's a dancing scene and there's one character who refuses to partake in the dance. He's out of harmony with the community. That character turns out to be the bad guy, the traitor, the villain. Right. So once you know to start looking for these things, you will see them everywhere. And of course, in here we have a conversation between Beatrice and Harrow in which Beatrice is using the metaphor of dance to explain courtship. So Shakespeare is very, very deliberate here. So let's go ahead and take a look at scene one of act two and then we can pick up with the rest of Act 2 next week. So I just. I just love that Leonidas is like, is Count John here? And she's like, benedict. She turns the conversation to Benedict immediately. She's like, oh, yes, that Count John, he's a mess. The perfect man would be halfway between Count John and Benedict. I mean, like, just. They can't stop.
- [71:13]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [71:15]
Angelina Stanford
And then this is when Leonidas says, leonato, Leonato, you keep talking like this and you're never gonna get a husband. And she's like, I don't want a husband. I don't want a husband.
- [71:24]
Thomas Banks
I'll never have that long soliloquy of hers, by the way, she alludes to some interesting folklore beliefs. So she talks about leading apes. Yeah. And this actually shows up in a John Davies, a Jacobian poet of roughly the same time as Shakespeare. There's a line in his noske tipsum, go gentle, maid, and lead the apes in hell. And it was, it was believed that old maids, when they died, would have to lead A chorus of apes in hell. I mean, believed. It was probably kind of half believed, but yeah, it's.
- [71:56]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. He references a similar folk tale in. Or, you know, kind of an old wives tale is what it really is in, In Taming of the Shrew, when, When Catherine, I can't remember what she says, but something like, it's clear you want me to do something at my sister's wedding. And it, it always reminds me, I'm. I'm from a very colorful, colorful culture in the United States that. The Cajun culture. And we have a lot of old wives tales like that, and we. We actually do them at weddings. So at my cousin's wedding, because the younger sibling got married before the older sibling, the older sibling had to dance with a broom at the reception in front of everybody.
- [72:38]
Thomas Banks
Oh. Huh. Okay.
- [72:40]
Angelina Stanford
And I guess that was supposed to be. So I'm sure it goes back to some really old folk tale, but that kind of stuff. Yes. So she's saying, I'm just going to be an old maid. I don't want to marry anybody.
- [72:50]
Thomas Banks
I thought I should give a little bit more explanation if I can backtrack a bit. So I. I had brought that quote from Ovid in as my commonplace in time, the savage bull doth bear the yoke. And I looked that up in three or four different critical editions of Shakespeare to see if any editor caught it. I'm sure some editors have, but none of the ones I read, because all of them trace it to Thomas Kyd, the Spanish tragedy. And there it's in time, the savage bull sustains the yoke. So, and yes, that's, you know, Shakespeare may have got it from there, but Shakespeare knew Ovid so well that he probably had read Ovid's Ars Amatoria. And that's where the line originally occurs. So it's Ovid, Thomas Kidd, Shakespeare.
- [73:31]
Angelina Stanford
Well done. I have to brag on you because that is not the first time that you have tracked down an original quote. When my annotations didn't do it one time I was showing you a passage from. I'd have to grab my copy because I actually wrote it in there, but it was my copy of Paradise Lost. And I have like four different annotated copies of Paradise Lost. And there was a line there, and four different annotations couldn't tell me what it was. And you looked at it and said, oh, actually he's referencing a minor Latin poet. It. And you, off the top of your head, you quoted it to me in Latin. Oh. And no one else had made that connection.
- [74:02]
Thomas Banks
Oh, I don't remember, but I'll take credit for it.
- [74:04]
Angelina Stanford
You should.
- [74:05]
Thomas Banks
All right.
- [74:05]
Angelina Stanford
You should. Very good.
- [74:06]
Thomas Banks
Get that tattooed on my chest.
- [74:08]
Angelina Stanford
Right across your forehead, actually. You could have, like, little teardrops tattooed under your eye for every time you get a literary illusion that an annotated edition doesn't.
- [74:16]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [74:16]
Angelina Stanford
Like. Like, let's see your version of, like, you know, how many people you murdered. How many?
- [74:20]
Thomas Banks
Right. I was going to say, this could be an interesting. Right there, you know, conversation starter at parties or with the police, you know, depending.
- [74:30]
Angelina Stanford
So this conversation where Leonardo is saying, look, you better be careful. You're never going to get married. This parallels the earlier conversation with Benedict and his boys where they're saying, hey, at this rate, you're never going to get married. So both characters have publicly said, I will never marry. And we know. We know.
- [74:47]
Thomas Banks
We've watched enough rom doomed already.
- [74:49]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. We know. We know not. Tell God make men of some other metal than earth. I love. I love that. All right, and then Beatrice says this. Here's. Here's the music metaphor. The fault will be in the music, cousin, if you be not wooed in good time. So she's making the pun there about musical time.
- [75:10]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah.
- [75:11]
Angelina Stanford
Keeping time, keeping in time, keeping in rhythm. If the prince be too important, tell him there is measure in everything. And so dance out the answer. Answer for hear me harrow wooing, wedding and repenting. Is this as a Scotch jig, a measure and a sink of pace. The first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical the wedding mannerly, modest, a measure full of state and ancient, ancient tree. And then comes repentance, and with his bad legs falls into the sink of pace, faster and faster till he sink into his grave. All right, so it's all of this marriage and wooing and falling in love. It's like music. It's. It's a hot and heavy dance at the beginning, like a jag, and then it slows down at the wedding, becomes very serious, and then it speeds up till it kills you. So can. Can you keep time with this dance? All right, so then Don Pedro comes in. He's in disguise, and of course, he woos Harrow. And then we have Benedict and Beatrice where they have. They have all of us. And she. We said this already, but he. He thinks, you know, maybe she doesn't know who I am, but she kind of also wants her to know who he is, and she totally knows who he is and is faking It. Huh? And she's like, oh, who's. Oh, I know who said that. Senor Benedict said that. That idiot loser. And he's like, surely. Surely not. Oh, yeah. Everybody knows it. And then at the end of that scene is when Don John does the bad deception of Claudio. So Don Pedro does the good deception of Harrow, pretending to be Claudia to woo her for him. And now Don John is doing the bad deception, right?
- [76:51]
Thomas Banks
Claudio, by the way, in a play full of gullible people, he stands out as just, like, such an easy mark. Because it's not. Not the only time this. This passage that he's taken in by Don John. We're going to see he's taken in more than once by Don John.
- [77:13]
Angelina Stanford
The first thing they do, okay? And this. Okay. So everything's so beautifully structured and paralleled. Benedict has just come up to Beatrice. She obviously knows it's him. And she pretends she doesn't know, right? So the exact same thing happens. Claudio walks in, they're all masked at this party. And Borachio's like, I'm gonna act like I don't know it's Claudio.
- [77:32]
Thomas Banks
He goes, senor Benedict, I presume you know me. Well, I am he. Yeah.
- [77:36]
Angelina Stanford
He's like, oh, I gotta tell you, your poor friend Claudio, he's really getting. He's really getting hung out to dry by this prince here. Oh, how so? He's stealing the girl, and then he just loses. He just loses his mind. Oh, yeah, but okay, but for born Elizabethan, this makes sense. He falls in love quickly. He's angered quickly. Like, everything about him is fast. So he immediately goes to. Of course, Don John's there, too, egging him on. He immediately goes to Benedict, and Benedict, what's the matter? He's like, oh, the prince is stealing her for himself. And he goes, hey, man, think. Think, man. Why would he do this? He's your. But what do you. He's your buddy. What. Why would he do this? Think. Think. So. So you have that right. You have Claudio, just, like, rushing.
- [78:18]
Thomas Banks
Don John told me. And he would never lie.
- [78:20]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, exactly. I definitely did not just defeat him on the battlefield. He's my best friend now, and I trust him. And. And Benedict's like, to use your head, man, but Claudio does not use your head. And then, of course, Benedict kind of brushes off Claudio.
- [78:33]
Thomas Banks
No.
- [78:33]
Angelina Stanford
Claudio's like, fine, I'm just gonna leave. And Benedict's, like, standing there by himself saying, did she know it was me? Did she not know it was for me? Did she really think that about me? Was she messing with my head? So she's all up in his head. Let's see. Should we do a little bit more of this scene?
- [78:50]
Thomas Banks
I think that we can leave off, actually.
- [78:52]
Angelina Stanford
I think so, too. I think we can leave off here. So let's leave. We'll leave off here. And so next time we'll finish act two, and we'll start and we'll get through act three and. Which will keep us right on schedule.
- [79:02]
Thomas Banks
Absolutely.
- [79:03]
Angelina Stanford
I love this play so much. I'm having a good time talking about you. We. I don't know if we've ever really talked in detail about this play together.
- [79:11]
Thomas Banks
No. I'm kind of surprised it took us this long to get to it. I. I've never taught it before.
- [79:16]
Angelina Stanford
I haven't never taught it either. No.
- [79:17]
Thomas Banks
I. I don't know why. Because it's. It's a play that's like, you know, it's the first Shakespearean comedy I ever really saw, I think.
- [79:26]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I don't think I've ever. No, I've never seen it in person. I've watched.
- [79:28]
Thomas Banks
No, I've seen several different, like, college and other productions. I've seen bad high school productions. I've seen good, you know, high school and college productions, and I've seen a couple by professional troupes. So, yeah, I don't know. It seems like this is one of the ones that's acted really, really commonly today. And I'm sure, like, the popularity of the various movies have something to do with that.
- [79:49]
Angelina Stanford
It's gotta be.
- [79:49]
Thomas Banks
And yeah, it is. It is a good actor's play. It is a good actor's play. For.
- [79:52]
Angelina Stanford
For the leads, we'll be having a special episode when we finish the play, and Atley will come on and we'll talk about different film versions of this. So you'll want to stick around for that. All right, well, stick around to the end of this podcast episode, because Mr. Banks will have a special poem recorded for you to go with this episode, as he always does. You can also, if you can't find the show notes, go over to our website, Literary Life, where Kiel will have all the books that we mentioned today, and our commonplace quotes and the poem will all be there for you. And don't forget, we've got Alice in Wonderland coming up on January 29th. And as I said last week, we've got Jen Rogers mini class on the Theory of Language and Literature by the Inklings, as well as we also have our conference, Living Language, why Words Matter. And we'll be giving you little teases about that conference in the weeks to come, but you'll want to head over to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out about that conference. Well, all right gang. This has been a whole lot of fun for me and hopefully things we are saying are helping you to think. Okay, wait. I understand so much better what Shakespeare's doing in these other plays now. So hang in there with us and we'll keep carrying on and delighting in the Bard together. Until then, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at MorningTimeForMoms. Join the conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [82:04]
Thomas Banks
Delight in Disorder by Robert Herrick A sweet disorder in the dress kindles in clothes a wantonness A lawn about the shoulders thrown into a fine distraction, an erring lace, which here and there enthralls the crimson stomacher. A cuff neglectful, and thereby ribbons to flow confusedly A winning wave deserving note in the tempestuous petticoat, A careless shoestring in whose tie I see a wild civility do more bewitch me than when art is too precise in every part.