Episode 262: “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Acts 2 & 3

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast - Episode 262 Summary: “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Acts 2 & 3

Host: Angelina Stanford
Co-Host: Thomas Banks
Guest: Cindy Rollins
Release Date: February 4, 2025

---

Introduction

In Episode 262 of The Literary Life Podcast, hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks delve into William Shakespeare's enduring comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. Joined by lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, the trio explores Acts 2 and 3, unpacking the play's intricate themes, character dynamics, and Shakespearean artistry.

Exploring Themes: Disguise and Appearance vs. Reality

A primary focus of the episode is Shakespeare's masterful use of disguise and the theme of appearance versus reality. Angelina remarks on the play’s "effortless quality", highlighting Shakespeare's confident, leisurely approach compared to his earlier comedies (02:31).

Notable Quote:
Thomas Banks: “He doesn't even invest it with any high poetry except in one or two key scenes. And yeah, he seems very much at his ease kind of at his leisure here.”
(02:31)

Angelina draws parallels to Shakespeare's earlier works, noting that Much Ado About Nothing showcases characters who are adept at masking their true intentions:

• Benedick and Beatrice: Initially anti-romantic, their witty banter masks deeper affections.
• Don John: Embodies the quintessential Shakespearean villain, using deception without the theatricality of characters like Iago from Othello.

Quote:
Angelina Stanford: “Disguise indeed is the very link Shakespeare was seeking between the realm of illusion and the dominion of fact.”
(15:30)

Language and Metaphor: The Art of Wordplay

The hosts delve into Shakespeare's intricate use of language, particularly through the character of Dogberry. Thomas highlights Dogberry's malapropisms and verbal ineptitude as a counterpoint to the verbal dexterity of Beatrice and Benedick.

Notable Quote:
Thomas Banks: “The great verbal dexterity of Beatrice and Benedick is paralleled by the great verbal ineptitude of Dogberry.”
(72:19)

Angelina discusses the strategic placement of songs within the play, such as “Sigh No More, Ladies,” which serves both as a thematic element and a commentary on gender dynamics.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford: “This song... is about men's inconstancy. So Shakespeare has turned the conventional song about girls breaking hearts into an unconventional one about guys.”
(46:17)

Character Analysis: Benedick, Beatrice, and Dogberry

Benedick and Beatrice:
Their evolving relationship is dissected, showcasing how Shakespeare uses their initial resistance to love as a vehicle to explore deeper emotional truths.

Dogberry and the Constables:
Presented as bumbling yet inadvertently effective, Dogberry and his team embody the comedic relief while inadvertently driving the plot forward through their misunderstandings and misuse of language.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford: “Dogberry has an ineptitude, which itself becomes an art.”
(72:27)

Critical Insights: W.H. Auden’s Analysis

Angelina and Thomas incorporate insights from W.H. Auden, discussing how Much Ado About Nothing juxtaposes the light-hearted, witty foreground with Don John’s malicious undertones. Auden's perspective sheds light on how Shakespeare maintains the comedic essence by keeping darker elements in the background.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford: “Auden says Shakespeare uses a subplot in a couple different ways. One as a parallel and the other as a contrast.”
(35:00)

Personal Anecdotes and Community Engagement

The hosts share updates about their community initiatives, including:

• Patreon Read-Alongs: Featuring performances of Much Ado About Nothing by their Patreon supporters.
• Recent Webinars: Highlighting a successful Alice in Wonderland webinar led by Addison.
• Upcoming Mini Classes: Including Jen Rogers’ “Words of Power,” exploring the Inklings’ influence on language and imagination.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford: “Our own rude mechanicals... they're absolutely wonderful. They are hashtag goals. They are living the literary life.”
(06:57)

Conclusion

Angelina emphasizes the importance of approaching literature “on its own terms”, advocating for understanding Shakespeare’s works through their inherent literary qualities rather than external lenses like sociology or psychology.

Notable Quote:
Angelina Stanford: “Literature as literature has incredibly important things to reveal to us, but only when we let it be itself and don't try to force it into some other box.”
(27:25)

The episode concludes with a tease for the next installment, which will cover Acts 4 and 5, and an invitation to explore their upcoming conference, Living Language: Why Words Matter.

---

Highlighted Quotes

1. Disguise and Ease:
   Thomas Banks: “[02:31] He doesn't even invest it with any high poetry except in one or two key scenes. And yeah, he seems very much at his ease kind of at his leisure here.”

2. Language as Garment:
   Angelina Stanford: “[16:20] Disguise indeed is the very link Shakespeare was seeking between the realm of illusion and the dominion of fact.”

3. Verbal Ineptitude:
   Thomas Banks: “[72:19] The great verbal dexterity of Beatrice and Benedick is paralleled by the great verbal ineptitude of Dogberry.”

4. Auden on Subplots:
   Angelina Stanford: “[35:00] Auden says Shakespeare uses a subplot in a couple different ways. One as a parallel and the other as a contrast.”

5. Literature’s Authenticity:
   Angelina Stanford: “[27:25] Literature as literature has incredibly important things to reveal to us, but only when we let it be itself and don't try to force it into some other box.”

---

Final Thoughts

Episode 262 offers a profound exploration of Much Ado About Nothing, blending scholarly analysis with personal reflections. The hosts adeptly navigate the play’s complex themes, demonstrating how Shakespeare's use of language, character dynamics, and thematic contrasts continue to resonate. Whether you're a seasoned Shakespeare enthusiast or new to his works, this episode provides valuable insights and fosters a deeper appreciation for one of his most beloved comedies.

Stay Tuned:
Next week, join Angelina and Thomas as they unpack Acts 4 and 5, followed by a special discussion on film adaptations with Atlee. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast, and consider supporting through Patreon to access exclusive content and engage with the community.

---

Timestamp Guide:

• 02:31 - Discussion on Shakespeare’s confident approach
• 15:30 - Disguise as a link between illusion and fact
• 46:17 - Analysis of “Sigh No More, Ladies”
• 72:19 - Paralleling character verbal skills
• 35:00 - Auden’s insights on subplots
• 27:25 - Importance of authentic literary analysis

---

Note: Due to the constraints of this summary format, some timestamps are illustrative placeholders and should correspond to the actual timing in the transcript.

Transcript

[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 is the man who I hope did not have to be tricked into falling in love with me.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, we'll never know. We'll never know. I mean, minstrels appeared and, you know, there was friends of mine talking in an obvious way about how great you are. But no, I think there was nothing suspicious going on.

[Angelina Stanford]

Nothing suspicious. No one, like, showed up wearing a disguise?

[Thomas Banks]

No, no. Like, no, you know, little infant with wings flew in and shot me with an arrow or anything.

[Angelina Stanford]

Remember some of our mutual friends saying, call him in to dinner. That seem to recall that.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah, that was. How charmingly awkward.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm Angelina Stanford. He's the mysterious Mr. Banks. This is the Literary Life Podcast and we are in our third episode on Shakespeare's wonderful play Much Ado About Nothing. So today we're going to pick up at scene two, act two, and take us through the end of scene three. So we have a lot of exciting stuff happening in here. I just love this play. Goodness, it's been too long since I read it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah, it's. I hadn't really noticed this about it before, but it seems like sort of an effortless play on Shakespeare's part. It doesn't like. Yeah, I mean, it's. He doesn't even, he doesn't even invest it with any high poetry except in one or two. Or any poetry at all to speak of, except in one or two key scenes. And yeah, he seems very much at his ease kind of at his leisure here. And I appreciate that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, this, this, you can absolutely tell the difference between this and some of the earlier comedies.

[Thomas Banks]

And this is, I mean, it's kind.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of not to say that the early comedies are not good. They simply. That effortless quality, like, this is a man at the height of his power.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I mean, this, it's kind of the midpoint of his career, too. I mean, he's at this.5 99ish, you know, year or two, you know, give or two a year, about halfway through his active career as a writer. And yeah, he, I think he seems confident of what he can do as a comic playwright.

[Angelina Stanford]

It also strikes me he's having a heck of a lot of fun.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Also. And like he's. He's even recycling bits from other plays kind of.

[Angelina Stanford]

And yeah, it's for an artistic purpose. On this particular read, some variations that he's doing is striking me for the first time. So this is very exciting that I'm seeing new things. I mean, you know, it's one of those things that you hear said and it sounds a little cliche that, you know, a classic is a book that never runs out of things to say. And I have found this to be absolutely true. Like, so I have read much to do about nothing, I don't even know how many times. And I'm. And I've been taught it before. And I have taught it before not in a class, but in other, other, you know, platforms. And I am seeing things I never saw before. And that is very exciting. And that is even true of the book I have read the most, Pride and Prejudice, which I think I have read 26 or 27 times. At some point I lost. I lost count. I've been reading it since I was 17 years old and I've taught it, oh, I don't even know how many times. I've taught a lot, A lot. And. And you would think that that is a book I know so well that I couldn't possibly see new things. And I do. Yeah, I do. In fact, the more that I Learned about the 18th century, even though she's technically a 19th century author, this is an 18th century book. And the more that I learn about the 18th century, the more, the more that I find. Like, for example. I'll give you an example. The opening line is the truth universally acknowledged. I found out that that is how almost all philosophic texts in the 18th century opened.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes. Yeah. Being with some, you know, very universal proposition.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And so she's ironically playing with that in the novel. Like, let's, let's look at some things that are universally acknowledged that actually aren't. Aren't true. Not every guy is leaving for a while.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, you could almost imagine. And not just 18th century philosophers. You could almost imagine Aristotle beginning some lecture with a statement like that. His metaphysics, man. It is man's Nature to desire to know, period.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right? It's a truth universe. Acknowledge that. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. All right, well, before we jump in, just a couple quick announcements. First of all, we have a free Much Ado About Nothing read along. I think I failed to promote that last week. So our Patreon, the Lit Life Players, as we like to call them, they. Boy, they put their heart and soul into this. The great costumes and accents, and it's fantastic. So they have been performing this play on our YouTube channel, and so you can find it there to watch. So when this airs, they will have done Acts 1, 2, and 3. So you can. On the House of Humane Letters YouTube channel, you can find these videos. And then next Monday night, you could jump into the live reading of Acts 4 and 5. We do these semi regularly, and it is just a hoot. Just, just. They have gotten more and more into it each time. It is just a delight to watch. And this year, we had two different read alongs going on. So we had the Patreon read along and then our students, unbeknownst to me, also organized and Much Ado About Nothing read along and have been acting it out together. And that's one of the things I just love about our student body so much, is they. They just can't seem to get enough. They take our classes. They take all the extra webinars and mini classes. They listen to the podcast. They read along together.

[Thomas Banks]

Our own rude mechanicals.

[Angelina Stanford]

Man, they are.

[Thomas Banks]

Actually, that's not fair. They're much better than that. They're more like our polished mechanicals, our Oompa Loompas.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, no, they're. They're absolutely wonderful. They. They are hashtag goals. They are living the literary life. And I just. I just love it. So again, go check out our Patreon. That is where the best conversations on the Internet are happening is on that. And we're really proud of the community we've been building over there. We also had. Last week, we had our Alice in Wonderland webinar, which to say was a success is an understatement. I have to share with you guys, the. I mean, Addison, no question, knocked it out of the park. It was really a breathtaking tour de force. And I'm not exaggerating, it's one of the finest things we've ever produced. And just to give you an indication of how I know that, in all our years of doing this, and we have highlighted a bunch of just fabulous speakers, this was the first time someone gave a webinar. And the immediate feedback I got was, you can die now, Angelina.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I wasn't sure I liked that too much. But yeah, there was several people did say some version of that thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's enough to note.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, go off to the nursing home now and concentrate on your knitting. You know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not upset about that. Yes, I can retire. I took that as incredibly high praise for her that, that people felt like she was filling some very large shoes. And it, it was just fantastic. People were saying things like, I'm not the same person I was 3 hours ago when, when the webinar started. It really was fantastic. So you can still pick up that, that video over at our website, HouseOfHumane Letters.com it is. Everybody was saying this was a steal at $15, cuz she went on for 3 hours. It really was just absolutely fantastic. And again, that entire webinar, if you're thinking to yourself, but I don't have any interest in Alice in Wonderland, that webinar came about because Northrop Fry said in one of his books, it's just kind of a throwaway line, Alice in Wonderland is at the heart of all of literature. And I thought, what is he talking about? And so I started literally, pun intended. I went down. Not literally figuratively, but pun intended. I fell down the rabbit hole to answer that question for myself, what is he talking about? And that ended up with Addison and I exploring this together. And that's how this webinar came about. So it's much, it's, it's, it's about Lewis Carroll, but it's really about all of literature.

[Thomas Banks]

That by itself is, I think, kind of proof of how central it is. I mean, it's, it's one of those books that we allude to, we refer to, we even quote without necessarily having read. It's just kind of in the bloodstream of, I don't know, our proverbial conversation, whether down the rabbit hole, Mad Tea Party.

[Angelina Stanford]

And this webinar, really, honestly, it fits the mission of the podcast that, you know, we really mean what we say in the opening of the podcast. We don't take the view that books exist in a vacuum and treat them as one offs and separately, because all of literature is a window and a door to all of literature. Right. It's always telling us something about the world of literature. And so this webinar really is about literature and how literature functions. So it's well worth your money. And we've also got something else coming up. So the first class for this will be February 10th. Jen Rogers, our own philologist and Anglo Saxon scholar, which she would say, I'm neither of those, but sorry, this is what you are. Her humility exceeds her, but she's got a fantastic mini class coming up. Let me tell you about that. It's called Words of Power, which is a reference to a Northrop Fry book, Words of Power, the Inklings on the nature of language and awakening our imagination. This is going to be a fantastic mini class. It's going to meet four Mondays from February 10th to March 3rd. Again, everything we do is live or later. So you'll have the videos and here's the description for that. The Inklings. It is a name we love, and for many of us, it conjures up a whole cosmos of worlds and imaginings. But when CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Owen Barfield called themselves the Inklings, they had something specific in mind. Despite their great differences in temperament and vocation, this circle of friends, which grew to include Charles Williams among other attendees, united around an intuitive appreciation of something beyond the walls of this world, contained in the words we write and speak every day. This Inkling, this sense of language haunting, was at the core of their friendship, is at the heart of their works, and is one of the greatest, yet most overlooked gifts the Inklings have passed on to us. In this four session mini class, we will go on an everyman journey, beginning at the foundation of Barfield's theory of words and then building toward William Strange Poetry, Tolkien's Phil. Philological genius, and Lewis's masterful combination of literary creativity and analysis. Along the way, we'll figure out why Barfield wanted appearances saved, how Tolkien formed a secret vice, and what on earth an Arthurian torso is anyway. But best of all, we just might catch an inkling of how words can wake up our imagination. I'm quite excited about this class and it is just going to be a perfect introduction and segue into our conference coming up in April called Living Language why Words Matter. So you'll be hearing more about that conference. We'll be dropping little pearls along the way, but that gives you an update kind of of what we've got going on. All right, Mr. Banks, it's time for Commonplace Quotes. You got one for me?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, I mean, fittingly after that. Mine is from C.S. lewis's On Stories, and this comes from an essay in that book on the novels of Charles Williams. He writes, morality has spoiled literature often enough. The truth is, it is very bad to reach the stage of thinking deeply and frequently about Duty, unless you are prepared to go a stage further. End quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

And yeah, I think when he says morality, he kind of means moralism rather than that didactic.

[Angelina Stanford]

Talk about here.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

A lot on the podcast. Yep, yep. Yeah. I feel like. Did you just because I quoted from On Stories last week, you grabbed it this week. Are you writing my coattails?

[Thomas Banks]

No, no, I, I, I've had this one in my commonplace book for a while. I think, actually that's of his essay collections. I think that's one of the key ones right there on Stories, which includes essays and articles he wrote on Chesterton, George Orwell, Charles Williams. I think there's at least one on Tolkien there.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's literally right here on my desk. Obvious. How convenient, since I've been quoting from it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And it's one of those that's available in cheap paperback. And I highly recommend if you are a Lewis fan of any, of any magnitude. Definitely, definitely get that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, he's got that great essay on George Orwell. He's got. Oh, yeah, he's got two essays on Tolkien. He's got one on the Lord of the Rings, too. That's where he's got his elegy for Dorothy Sayers in here as well.

[Thomas Banks]

It does, yeah. Which is a really, really sweet way to write about a departed friend.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's just fantastic. Sometimes fairy stories, maybe they say best. What's to be said, That's a really good essay on three ways for writing for children. Yeah. These are all, these are all classics. Some of these are also published, as you find out when you start collecting Lewis books, that it's a lot of the same stuff recycled under different titles. A lot of this stuff is also in the collection of Other Worlds, and I have that one, too. All right, my turn. So I've mentioned before that Harold Goddard is one of my favorite people to listen to talk about Shakespeare, one of my favorite dead Shakespearean scholars. So I was pulling out one of his volumes, and I just think Harold Goddard gets Shakespeare. He just gets him in his bones. He understands what's going on. I adore him. And so I thought I'd share a quote about disguise in Shakespeare's plays, because we have some disguises in here. We have disguises, actually in every single one of Shakespeare's plays. And in a minute, when we get going, I'll tell you how I think he's using disguise in this play. But I like Harold Goddard for kind of setting up the framework here. Disguise indeed is the very link Shakespeare was seeking between the realm of illusion and the dominion of fact. Okay, going down several paragraphs here. And he's talking about all the different plays and all the different ways disguises use. And then he says this clothes. That is a metaphor. That sums it up. And from the comedy of errors to the tempest, meaning from the first play he wrote to the last, There is not a more persistent metaphor in Shakespeare. Being versus seeming. That is the theme which underlies it all. And there is not a more persistent theme in Shakespeare's plays. That is absolutely true. Good old Dr. Fields back in the day, I remember I wrote all over my Shakespeare notebook, appearance versus reality. Appearance versus reality. That is the big theme in Shakespeare. And you're going to see a bazillion variations of that. Now, I just said disguise is always a part of Shakespeare's plays. And you might be thinking, no, no, no, no. I can think of some where no one's in disguise. But see, Goddard goes on to say, now, words as well as actions are the medium of drama. And because words are the garments of thought, they are indispensable instruments for obtaining and maintaining the effect of duality in life and on the stage. So he says, words is also a garment that can disguise you in Shakespeare's plays.

[Thomas Banks]

To see if I'm following you here, Would this be an example of what we're talking about? So in Julius Caesar, there's never any, you know, young man who disguises himself as a woman or young woman who disguises herself as a man to deceive someone she's in love with. There's none of that foolery. But characters. Motives remain hidden from other characters who ought to see them. So Brutus, who is one of the things about Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar is not the tragic hero. Brutus is. Brutus doesn't really understand the lowness of his fellow conspirators motives. And he also does not understand the probable consequences of this assassination, which he hopes is going to cure the republic of all of its ills. So you could say the nature of his fellow man is kind of disguised from his ability to perceive it. Would that be maybe an instance?

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's getting closer to it. So let's take something like Macbeth. There's a lot being concealed in macbeth. Yeah, but not by a literal change of clothes. Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth, be the flower, but play the serpent underneath.

[Thomas Banks]

Play the flower, but.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah, Play the flower, but be the serpent. False face doth hide what false heart doth know.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so while he doesn't literally have a mask, he is Putting on a mask.

[Thomas Banks]

He also actually, it's a. It's a brilliant line where he pins the blame of the assassination on the two grooms, the two servant boys who had been in Duncan's retinue. I think he says something like, gild their faces with the blood for it must seem their guilt.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. The pun on guilt Guild and guilt. Yeah. And so he literally wipes the blood on their faces. Yeah, so. Yeah, so. So you. Shakespeare is playing with all the different masks we wear. So sometimes, especially in the comedies, it's going to be a literal mask, a literal change of clothes, a literal disguise. We have all of that happening in this play, but sometimes it's being fake, pretending to be your best friend while you're plotting to kill you. We see that with. In the character of Don John here, because he's not wearing a literal mask when he's telling all this, but he is putting on the mask when he's like, listen, we're buds, right? We're butts. I know. Like, you just tried to kill me on the battlefield, but we're buds.

[Thomas Banks]

We're bros. Yeah, you can totally trust me.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there's a bro code. You can trust me. You gotta. You know, bros before heroes, right? Wink, wink. And you know, you can trust me. I know. What's. What's going on with this girl. So Shakespeare, again, he's the master of theme and variation. Theme and variation. Just like, great composer. And so his theme is appearance versus reality and clothes. And disguise is the way he does that. But he is always showing us the most dangerous disguises are the ones where you don't think the person is wearing a disguise.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

You think you're looking at the real person and they're not. Which is why, again, a variation on that. Why the fool in Shakespeare's tragedies who's dressed as a clown. So you would think this is clearly someone. This is a character. Right. He's got a mask, he's a clown. He's usually the one that tells the.

[Thomas Banks]

Truth, which is we're going to see here kind of also.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's right. In our Dogberry character. Yeah. Very good. Okay, so I want to bring up a couple of things that we covered in the last episode. Before we jump into these new things, we had a great question. I didn't even tell you about this. I'm catching you off guard. I'm curious what you're going to say about that. So we had a great question from longtime listener and Patreon supporter, Devorah And I believe Devorah played Beatrice in the Much Ado About Nothing production and was fabulous. So she was looking closely at the scene of the dance with Benedict and Beatrice. And we had said on the podcast, she knows it's him and she's messing with him. And she said that all of her commentary said she knows it's him and she's messing to him. And she said, how do we know, though? How do we know in the text? How do we know that she actually knows him? So I spent some time yesterday trying to answer that for myself, and this is what I've come up with, because she's absolutely right. When I went looking closely in the text, that it doesn't say, here's why I think. Here's why I think she knows because of the way that we have all this double set up. So the scene starts with Antonio walking up to Ursula in a disguise. And she's like, I know who you are. This disguise is. This is you. It's your body, it's your bearing. You know, just because you have a little Mardi Gras mask on doesn't mean I don't know who you are. So I think that sets the stage for this scene that none of these masks are really disguising. We have Don John who sees Claudio wearing a mask. He's like, well, that's obviously Claudio, but I'm gonna pretend like I don't know who it is so I can mess with his head. So we have that exact setup, and then we get to Benedict and Beatrice. So that's why I just think it's consistent with what we're seeing, that nobody is really fooled by these disguises and messing with people.

[Thomas Banks]

And while she's insulting him, you notice she kind of flirts with him. She says, I'm sure he is somewhere in the fleet. Would he had boarded me, like, I'd like to be dancing with him right now. It's like, wait, is she insulting me or is she flirting with me or both? I don't. I don't even know.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it's another type of messing with his head.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And so we have that. That whole. Oh, this play is so structured in.

[Thomas Banks]

The Branagh Thompson movie. They do that scene very well.

[Angelina Stanford]

They do it very well.

[Thomas Banks]

And I think he's. He's wearing like this ridiculous it's mask.

[Angelina Stanford]

Obviously him.

[Thomas Banks]

And it's. Yeah. And he does a fake face accent. And she obviously is not taken in by it's. Yeah, I think. I think very much so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Especially the fact that when she mentions Benedict, he's like, oh, who is that? I've never even heard of him. Like. Like, it's just so over the top.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

But this idea that we have double. Double plots of. Of people getting their heads messed with.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

One for good purposes and one for very nefarious purposes.

[Thomas Banks]

And.

[Angelina Stanford]

And we're going to see all of that why? Okay, so when people fall for concealment in this play, why. Why is it that they're falling and it's because they have the false idea of the person doesn't know they're talking to me. Therefore it must be the truth. Right. So with Claudio and Don John, Don John is telling him, well, you know, the prince is stabbing you in the back, and he's actually wooing this girl for himself. And Claudio thinks to himself, this has to be true because he doesn't know he's telling me.

[Thomas Banks]

Huh.

[Angelina Stanford]

So in a sense, that's another eavesdropping. Like, Claudio feels like I have eavesdropped on the conversation between John, Don John, John, John, John. I'm never gonna get that right. John, John, John, John Kennedy makes an appearance in this play, Don John, which also my brain wants to say Don Johnson. Like, it's just a mess. It's just a mess from my mouth.

[Thomas Banks]

I imagine him wearing a sport jacket.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Miami Vice, you know, no socks. Exactly. That's the real tragedy here is the fashion. But so in a sense, Claudio feels like he has eavesdropped on a conversation between Don John and Benedict. Therefore, it must be true. Benedict is going to do the same thing in Act 3. We see when he is eavesdropping, but thinks falsely. They don't know I'm here listening. So therefore everything they're saying must be true. It must be true because they don't know I'm here. This, therefore, it must be the truth. But what we fact, we find out is all of the eavesdropping is not eavesdropping at all. It's all a series of performances.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, it is indeed.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's all masks, it's all concealment. It's all acting. And we see the seeming versus being thing plays with that performing acting versus reality.

[Thomas Banks]

Something I was thinking about the villains in this play. Don Jon is of a piece with some of Shakespeare's tragic villains. Iago, the plotters, Edmund in King Lear. Cassius, I think, in a way. But he's not so dark as to spoil the atmosphere. He's not so sinister a character as to make us forget that we're watching a Comedy. And I think the fact that he is the two kind of witless co. Conspirators.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. As his counterpart.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I know. So these are not criminal masterminds.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not at all.

[Thomas Banks]

It's actually kind of a stupid plot.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not at all.

[Thomas Banks]

Think about it.

[Angelina Stanford]

So WH Auden had something really interesting to say about that exact point. That Don John, I mean, he is the prototype of Iago in Othello. And Iago is probably to me the most terrifying Shakespeare villain.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just really that kind of snake pretending to be your best friend.

[Thomas Banks]

And also kind of mysterious.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very mysterious. In the same way that Don John is being paralleled with Satan. I just want to cause trouble for trouble's sake. Iago's basically the same way.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you've got potentially a terrifying villain in the middle of a light hearted comedy. And Auden says that the way Shakespeare pulls this off is by making the light witty stuff be always in the foreground and the dark stuff be always in the background. And it's skillfully done.

[Thomas Banks]

That was what I was clumsily trying to say myself.

[Angelina Stanford]

I knew that's.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm not WH Auden.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sadly, the Auden essay on Much Ado About Nothing is probably my favorite one that I've read of him so far. Oh yeah, he's got some great insights.

[Thomas Banks]

He's absolutely fantastic interpreter of Shakespeare. And he also. Here's something. I was reading this great essay on his contemporary, the American poet and professor Mark Van Doren. And one of Van Doren's students was Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who. In an appreciation, indeed. Yes, in an appreciation, he wrote of Van Dorn. He said that his students loved him because he always spoke about literature as literature, not as sociology or as economics or as past politics or something like that. But yeah, there was, there was. And, and in his. When he spoke about Shakespeare, he could reveal depths in the plays that you wouldn't have noticed before, but he could always approach them very simply.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so allow me to get on my little molehill to die on here. When we talk about the importance of talking about literature as literature, I think that sometimes there is the mistaken a conclusion that we are saying. Literature doesn't have anything to say. Just talk about literature at literature essentially means it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything when what we actually are saying is the opposite. Literature means a lot. I mean, our tagline is Stories will save the world. It means a lot, but it only means a lot when you allow it to be what it is. When you come to it on its own terms. When you try to force it into something else, it's a sociological comment. It's psychology, it's. It's history, which is absurd because art is not history. Shakespeare changes the history of his historical plays all over the place for dramatic purposes. It's like Northrop Fry says, you know, you don't read Macbeth to find out Scottish history. You read Macbeth to find out what happens when a man gains the whole world but loses his soul.

[Thomas Banks]

Well put.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's what we're talking about. Literature as literature has incredibly important things to reveal to us, but only when we let it be itself and don't try to force it into some other box, because here's your choice. It can either show us the most profound things about human nature and reality, or it can just be really bad sociology, really second rate psychology, and frankly, false history. Like, you know, that, that, that's the options here. All right, we're going to talk way more about that in our episode where it's going to be experiment and criticism revisited. I'm going to come back and have a lot to say about this sort of thing.

[Thomas Banks]

All right.

[Angelina Stanford]

One more thing I want to say before we look at the new passages. That has to refer to what we talked about last time. So looking at the feedback, a lot of you were acting. Were responding to. Not acting, sorry, responding to the Northrop Fry quote I gave last week about character. And that character exists for the plot. The plot does not exist for the character. And many of you were saying this was mind blowing and it helped to explain so much about how to read Shakespeare and really helped you to be able to name the ways in which, the ways you were talked, taught Shakespeare are all wrong. So many people message me. Yes, yes. Every class I talked about, that's exactly what our teacher has done. He's pulled these characters out of the play, you know, paraded them around in real life and said, what do we think about that? You know, what kind of marriage would Lady Macbeth and Macbeth have if we met them at the dinner party down the street? But they don't exist in real life. They exist in a story. And so I started thinking after the last episode, well, somebody might be confused then, because we talked about the characters. We talked about Benedict and Beatrice, we delighted in them. We talked about Claudio and Harrow and Don John and Don Pedro. So let me see if I can help you understand the difference. We talked about the characters in terms of their function in the story. That will become more apparent as we go on because you Got to finish the play to see the whole shape of the play. Once we have the whole shape in our heads, then we can see how the characters are functioning. So, yes, we talked about them. Well, we only talked about them in relation to their value in the story. We didn't pull them out and we didn't put them on the. On the therapist couch either. We didn't. We didn't speculate. Why does Benedict have commitment issues? What, what has happened? What trauma? Maybe. Maybe he's lost so many guys on the battlefield that he's coming back with PTSD and so he can't commit. Now I just said that completely snarkily. And as I said it, I realized there is an article that claims that. That wants to read this.

[Thomas Banks]

Are you serious?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Wants to read this play through the lens of ptsd, like it's a light comedy. This is. This is. No, no, Right, exactly. Thank you. Thank you for that. That his. There's smoke coming out of my husband's ears right now, ladies and gentlemen. You know, we didn't ask that, we didn't speculate, you know, about Claudio, why he wants to get married, you know, what are his issues? Why wouldn't Claudio have ptsd? So we didn't pull them out of the story and talk about what would these characters be like in real life? Because they aren't real life. They're in a story. And as I tell my students all the time, the question to ask when you're meeting something in a story is not to ask, what would this mean if I met it in real life? Because this is not real life. What would it mean if I met.

[Thomas Banks]

It in a story at the same time? That's not to say that. I mean, I think we all have met someone who reminds us of someone from Shakespeare. Like, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Saying that they're stock characters like cookie cutters. I mean, Shakespeare's genius is that he gives us three dimensional human beings. My point is you're only going to understand Benedict if you understand his function in the story.

[Thomas Banks]

Assuredly. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I agree. We all know a Benedict and a Beatrice and a Claudio and a heroine. And that is to Shakespeare's genius. Yeah, that is to Shakespeare's genius.

[Thomas Banks]

This.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. But to pull them out and to throw them out with a therapist, you know, I don't know. Do you actually sit on a therapist couch now? In my mind you do.

[Thomas Banks]

I think that's probably kind of outdated, but. Yeah. But yeah, that's how I imagine.

[Angelina Stanford]

You get the idea.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, I imagine all therapists as being elderly Swiss.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Exactly. Tell me about your mother. Do you have some kind of motherly issues and you weren't breastfed long enough and that's why you can't commit? That's the kind of stuff that people do all the time, though. And they. So they pull these characters out of the story. They spend the whole time talking about things that are not related to the story. So now we're all just going to have to talk about all the men we know with commitment issues, which. That's kind of like my grad school experience, that that's what people wanted to do. They always wanted to yank things out of the story related to themselves and then just spend the whole time talking about themselves. That's fine. You can talk about yourself. You can think about your childhood. You can think about your own mama issues and your own commitment issues. That's. But that's not going to tell us what Shakespeare is really doing here. But the real value is. I'll never forget, in one of my grad school classes, this was right around the time that I thought, I am leaving you people. I am not spending my life with you guys as my peers because you don't love books. I remember being in this graduate class, and I think we were reading Tess of the Durablevilles, and the professor was like this real expert on Hardy. And I mean, I was just taking notes like a mad woman. He was just blowing open this book for me. It was fantastic. And one of my classmates was like, you know, the way Tess is being treated kind of reminds me of the time when I was four and a boy pushed me off of a swing on the playground. And he took the swing, and then everybody's like, yeah, right, men. And they just went off and running. I was like, every, Please, please save me. Save me from this insanity.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And it was hard on Tess as well, you know, maybe a little bit worse than.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, your face. You were. It was a good joke, honey, but don't spoil the ending of Tess. But. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, then, let's start with Act 2, Scene 2, and move on forward. So we've got. Sorry, I got a million books in front of me right now, and I have a lot to say about W.H. auden's essay. Well, actually, let me say this. I've got pages and pages here of. Of Auden notes. But I'll say this before we jump in, because we're.

[Thomas Banks]

We're.

[Angelina Stanford]

We're beginning. We're going to be introduced in scene two here to the. Don John plot of ruining Harrow and destroying Claudio's happiness. And Auden says Shakespeare uses a subplot in a couple different ways. One as a parallel and the other as a contrast. And so in this play, we have it as a contrast, he says we have the comic, like dual light duel of wits in the foreground and the dark malice of Don John in the background. Like I said earlier, he says, this is what keeps the play from becoming a tragedy, that Shakespeare keeps the darker elements in the background. I thought that's the kind of Shakespeare criticism I just love. Like, tell me patterns, tell me structure. Yes, this is how Shakespeare always uses these things, because once you understand the pattern, then you can see the variations. And the meaning almost always is coming with the variations. Even what I introduced last week about the anti romantic and the ultra romantic, Shakespeare is playing with that, and it's going to be very, very interesting. Alrighty. You know, it might be easier for me to do this podcast episode if I didn't have the world's largest Shakespeare volume in front of me. This thing is so hard to move around, but it's got 30 years of notes in it, so I cannot change to a smaller book.

[Thomas Banks]

It's more than a doorstop.

[Angelina Stanford]

You could.

[Thomas Banks]

You could stop a sizable gate with that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I dare say I could probably put it under my sweater and stop a bullet. I would be safe. It's my personal. Shakespeare is mine. Shakespeare saved my life. That'll be my story. Okay, so it starts with some very interesting comments here. Don John saying, any bar, any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to me. I am sick in displeasure. Okay, that's kind of a fair is fall. Fall is fair theme.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Don John is so disordered that he says, you know, any disorder is going to be medicine to my soul. It's going to make me better. I'm sick in displeasure. So he's all upside down and disordered here. So he says, let's cause trouble. And Borachio has a plan. He says, well, I'm actually in pretty good with her. Lady in waiting, Margaret. Here's my plan. So we have another mask. Margaret's going to pretend to be Harrow. I will seduce Margaret. We will make sure that Claudio is in a position to overhear. Right. Quote, unquote, More eavesdropping. That's not eavesdropping. It's really a performance. He'll see that, and he's going to think she's, you know, a common stale, A contaminated stale, which means a common prostitute. He's Going to think the worst of her, and it's going to ruin.

[Thomas Banks]

And we should say here that Margaret is not actually in on the plot, even though she's going to be involved in it. Right. I think Auden says that that's one of those plot flaws that we kind of overlook. Like, does Margaret really not know what's going on here? Doesn't she think it's kind of odd that he would ask her to appear at a window as Harrow? Anyway, it's. But it's one of those things that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, interesting nighttime game.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure. Yeah. I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, he says we're gonna do this, and we're gonna cause a bunch of trouble because it's gonna undo Harrow. It's gonna kill Leonato, because, of course, her father would drop dead with heart attack. It's gonna misuse the prince. It's gonna vex Claudio. Like, you know, this is a win, win, win, buddy. You're gonna be able to get everybody you don't like. And he says, I'm in. Let's do it. So we're gonna have another deception, another mask, more mistaken identity, more disguise. Now, this is an aside about disguises, because we talked about this the other day. And again, I like when we talk about Shakespeare for you to be able to take what we're saying and apply to all other Shakespeare plays. So this isn't like a huge part of this play just as a tiny little bit, but it's a big, big part of a lot of other plays where the audience is supposed to believe that the person in disguise, that the actors on the stage really don't know who it is, or even in Shakespeare's plays, a lot of times, the actors who are supposed to be twins look nothing alike on stage. So we have this here with this scene. It's going to be off stage, but we are supposed to believe that Claudio would mistake Margaret for Harrow. And I'm looking at my husband like, you better know what I look like. You better know everything about my mannerisms. That even if somebody had on a wig like me, you'd be like, that's not how she moves. Right? Correct. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

I think you're pretty unmistakable.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hand on the Bible. Okay, There you go. You heard it here first, folks. His solemn vow. But we have to understand that it's a stage convention. So even if they're playing twins and they look nothing alike, the stage convention is they're twins. So it is the wrong attitude to sit there and say, but they don't look anything alike. This is so stupid. It's a stage convention. The audience would have accepted that these people are twins, even if they don't look alike. Then you take a play like Twelfth Night or as you like it, where you have girls dressed up as boys, and then women fall in love with them. And we might be thinking, but that's ridiculous. She doesn't really look like a boy. It's a stage convention. And so, you know, you're just going to accept that. Everybody. Everybody thinks it's. It's. It's the girl, it's the boy. And so I started trying to think, like, what stage conventions do we have that are similar to this? And the other day I thought of this. We have our own stage conventions, but we're so used to them that we don't think about them as conventions. But the ones that we're not used to, like twins who don't look alike, we get upset about that. But we have a stage convention when we watch a movie with adult actors and there's a flashback to when the. The. The. The character was a child, it almost never really looks like that person. And we just accept, you know, that's Julia Roberts when she was a kid. We know that's not Julia Roberts when she's a kid, but we accept it as a stage convention.

[Thomas Banks]

I was going to say we accept. Okay, the romantic comedy where you have the plain girl who's really the hot girl.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

And she wears her hair in, like, a ponytail and wears glasses, and then she has some makeover halfway through the movie, and it's like everyone notices then, oh, my gosh, she's really hot, but she had glasses before, so I just never saw that kind of thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or how about Superman and Clark, Kentucky?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. It's the convention that when he's got the glasses on, he's not the same person. Right. Okay, so this is just a reminder not to be irritated with other time periods, conventions. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Lewis talks about that. He says, no, they were not so stupid as to think that. Oh, yeah, you know, back, back. Or we shouldn't be so stupid as to think that. Back then, people didn't really understand that, you know, someone is still the same person if they're wearing a disguise, et cetera. And yeah, they were so stupid. They thought that, like, you know, Rosalind, if she puts on boy clothes, would actually deceive Orlando and he would be taken in by that. I mean, people were just so naive back in the day. They were a simpler people.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. And you know, what happens is we are just so accustomed to our own stage conventions that we don't realize that we follow stage conventions. And probably most people would say we don't. Everything's realistic in our time period. We don't have any stage conventions. We have a lot of stage conventions. Yeah, we just mentioned three. All right, Scene three, Benedict comes in, and we get a soliloquy. So I don't think I've explained this yet. A soliloquy is when a character is on a stage talking to the audience, and this is to be understood as his interior thoughts. And therefore, when a character is having a soliloquy that is, you know, no one else is on the stage, only we can hear him. It's kind of the equivalent of a voiceover in a. In a film. And it means that we are hearing that character's true thoughts. This is. This is him telling the truth. This is his inner monologue. Right. So this is not. So, as opposed to all of the eavesdropping, that's really. Performances. The soliloquy is not a performance. This is. This is really what Benedict thinks. So this is. This is fantastic. Because he's sitting there going, I wonder what kind of man falls in love. Claudia used to be so cool. You were a cool bro. Like, we were out there on the battlefield. We're blowing it up now. You're just gonna. One of those.

[Thomas Banks]

Also, he's also annoyed by the way Claudio has started to speak. He says he used to be straightforward, like, you know, speak his mind like a man, you know. And what does he say here? I have it.

[Angelina Stanford]

He was meant to speak plain. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Like an honest man and a soldier. And now he has turned orthographer. His words are a very fantastical banquet. Just so many strange dishes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so that's a great line that I'm going to come back to in a minute because Auden has a whole lot to say about this particular use of language in this play. So we'll. We'll. We'll. I'm going to come back to that. But then he says, may I be so converted and see with these eyes? I cannot tell. I think not. So he's like, would this happen to me? Could me. Could I turn into some idiot like this who's all in love? And then.

[Thomas Banks]

And then.

[Angelina Stanford]

Do you want to read his little speech there?

[Thomas Banks]

But then he has, like, this very specific idea of the woman.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

I would never fall in love unless she hit all of these hilarious. One woman is so. One woman is fair, yet I am well, another is wise. Yet I am well. Another virtuous. Yet I am well. But till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that's certain. Wise, or I'll none. Virtuous, or I'll ne'er cheapen her. Fair, or I'll never look on her Mild, or come not near me. Noble or not, I, for an angel of good discourse, an excellent musician. And her hair shall be what color? It please God.

[Angelina Stanford]

Her hair could be. What color please God. Like, I don't really. Her hair can be whatever. He's so easygoing. Her hair can be whatever. She doesn't have to be all.

[Thomas Banks]

All of the other things.

[Angelina Stanford]

All of the.

[Thomas Banks]

Actually, it's. Again, you. You mentioned the parallel between this and Pride and Prejudice. It reminds me a little bit about where Mr. Darcy is talking about what is an accomplishment.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Oh, that's right.

[Thomas Banks]

She must know, like, all modern languages and be well read the principal modern and ancient authors.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, Bingley says, all young ladies are accomplished. And Darcy says, no, they're not accomplished at all. And he gives this impossible list. And after that, Elizabeth says, well, does it surprise me now that you only know six accomplishments?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he's only met. Yeah. Like, is it even six? I think it says, like, three. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, that makes sense, because you have an impossible list. Yes. Yeah, exactly. All we need is for Benedict to say that Beatrice has a pair of fine eyes. And we were right back in Pride and Prejudice. But I just love the snark because. Okay, so here comes the Prince and Claudia, and he goes, oh, it's the Prince and Monsieur Love. Oh, hilarious. Okay, so the prince calls for music. And now we're gonna have a song. Okay, I got a bunch of notes about this song, but first I have to share. This is probably my favorite line of Shakespeare's. When Benedict says, is it not strange that sheep's guts should hail souls soul out of men's bodies? I love that so much. So, sheep guts being like, you know, violin strings, and.

[Thomas Banks]

I think he actually does like the music.

[Angelina Stanford]

He does?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. He's. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Really?

[Thomas Banks]

This song again. And so the guys performs the song. Actually, we should pay attention to the song itself.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've got a lot of notes on this.

[Thomas Banks]

So the song. Sigh no More, Ladies. Sigh no more Men were deceivers ever One foot in sea and one on shore to one thing constant never Then sigh not so, but let them go and be you blithe and bonny Converting all your sounds of woe into hey nonny, nonny sing no more ditties Sing no mo of dumps so dull and heavy the fraud of men was ever so since summer first was leafy Then sigh not so, but let them go and be you Blithe and Bonnie Converting all your sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny. By the way, that shows that Shakespeare, he could actually write very facile and really not even very good poetry and turn it into a very important moment in the play.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

It's kind of. Kind of a theme is enunciated here in this. I mean, frankly, these are like pop lyrics almost.

[Angelina Stanford]

Basically, like they're playing a Taylor Swift song right here in the middle, right. About how men are going to dump you and break your heart. Okay, so Auden's got a great analysis of this scene. Let me share some of his notes. So you were talking about that Benedict is pointing out Claudio has changed the way he talked.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Auden makes a big deal about this and says that one of the variations on the appearance versus reality theme that we talked about with that earlier God, modern quote, seeming and being, that Shakespeare is doing something with language in this play, with seeming and being. And in particular, Auden says that Shakespeare is showing us that there's reality and there's pretense, and that is connected to the way we talk. So first, the song Auden says where and how songs are placed in Shakespeare is revealing. Very often, the setting criticizes the song's convention. So this is a conventional song, but it's in the. It's placed in a weirdly weird place because they're sitting around talking about Claudio so in love. So in love. And they sing a song about how guys can't be trusted. Yeah, guys can't be trusted. And of course, that's exactly what's going to happen even in this act. Right. Claudio's gonna. Gonna fall for a gulling about gully means, like, to trick. He's gonna fall for this trick and believe that. But Auden goes on to say that the serenade convention is actually turned upside down in Balthazar's song. Okay, so we've talked before about how the emphasis was on women's inconstancy, but this song is about men's inconstancy. So Shakespeare has turned the conventional song about girls are gonna break your heart into the unconventional. In terms of Renaissance. Guys are gonna break.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, there's a thousand this woman played me false, you know, lyrics and sonnets from this time, I'm thinking, oh, what's one? When Thou must home to Shades of Underground by Thomas Campion, where he addresses his lover. Thomas Campion was one of Shakespeare's contemporaries. So he's addressing this imaginary lover saying, when you go down to Hades and there arrived a new admired guest, you know, greet all the beauties round, you know, Iape, Blythe, Helen and the rest. So greet all the other beautiful women and then tell them how you murdered me. Tell them how you, you know, you played me false.

[Angelina Stanford]

Did Agamemnon write that?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, you could kind of imagine. Yeah, yeah. This is like Clytemnestra came into the bathroom with the axe.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just like every Hank Williams song. You know, you're cheating heart. Yeah, and all that. Okay, okay, so. So I got loads of notes here. All right. So he points out that this song describes Claudio. It describes what Claudio is going to do. If one imagines the sentiments of the song being an expression of character. The only character they suit is Beatrice. And I do not think it is too far fetched to imagine that. The song arouses in Benedict's mind an image of Beatrice, the tenderness of which alarms him. The violence of his comment when the song is over is suspicious. And he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him. And I pray God his bad voice bode no mischief. I had as live have heard the night raven come. What plague could have come after it? So he has. Yeah, he has quite a violent reaction. I hate this song.

[Thomas Banks]

Also that line about. I mean, it's a throwaway line, but Shakespeare evidently was really fond of it, that hanging the dog. Because a couple scenes later another character is going to joke about hanging a dog. I could not hang a dog, much less a man. That's one of Dogberry's lines anyway. Shakespeare, by the way, is proof that great artists, great comic artists sometimes revisit their jokes.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's always classic. Yeah, I think it's Goddard, but it might be. Tillard says that very often. It's in the little throwaway moments like them sitting around listening to the song, that the real heart of the themes is revealed.

[Thomas Banks]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so let's keep going. And then I'm going to come back to the stuff that Auden says about language. Because I think we need to get a little further in for. For this to make a ton of sense. Now we have the famous gulling scene. There was such great language here. So it's really two parts. First they're gonna gull Benedict and then they're gonna gull Beatrice. So we're saying Gull G, U, L L means Renaissance word for trick. This is the word that.

[Thomas Banks]

Befool.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. This is the word that Jonathan Swift is playing with. With Gulliver.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because he's going to trick. So we have part one here at the end of act two. And part two, where they're going to trick Beatrice is at the beginning of Act 3. And they're using the eavesdropping technique. But again, it's not real eavesdropping, it's a performance.

[Thomas Banks]

Now, remind me, this play is either right before or right after as you Like It. No, not as you like it. Sorry. Twelfth Night. They're back to back, I think, just about.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's right before as yous Like It.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's right before as yous Like It. And it's very close to Twelfth Night as well, I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep.

[Thomas Banks]

And Twelfth Night also do.

[Angelina Stanford]

Then as yous like it, then Twelfth Night.

[Thomas Banks]

Twelfth Night also has a gulling scene. Yes, it does, with Malvolio. So this seems to be a device.

[Angelina Stanford]

That he's having a good time.

[Thomas Banks]

He thought he was having a good. Yeah, he's having a good time. Having some success with it.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Okay, so I loved all of the language here about. We have a fish on the line. We got him. We've hooked him. Tug a little bit.

[Thomas Banks]

So a lot to hook. Well, fish will bite.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, all of that. And so he thinks he's noting. Right. He thinks he's eavesdropping. He thinks he's overhearing. And his first thought is, because they're going on and on about, can it be true? Can Beatrice really be in love with Benedict? And he says here, line 119 in mind, I should think this is a gull that the white bearded fellow speaks.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, an old guy saying it. I mean, Leonardo, he's totally respectable. He would never take part in some game.

[Angelina Stanford]

Knavery cannot sure. Hide himself in such reverence. So again, we have appearance versus reality. He. He assumes that the mask of old age means a certain seriousness. And he would never be involved in a practical joke. So it must be true.

[Thomas Banks]

True.

[Angelina Stanford]

It must be true. And, oh, this is just such a fantastic scene because they. They. I mean, they just get him. She's in love. Oh, but she'll never tell him. She'll never. She said she'll die. She's just gonna die. She's gonna die because she's so in love. And she can't tell him. But she'll die if she tells him. But why won't she tell him all because he'll mock her. He'll mock her and make fun of her. So they just completely.

[Thomas Banks]

They draw this picture of Beatrice, which is just so out of character. Yet he's like. He says that every night she falls down, you know, and beats her heart, saying, sweet Benedict, God give me patience. Like that sounds like her. Yeah, sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

Falls for it. He falls for it. And they're saying, well, you know, it would be good if Benedict could find out. Oh, no, don't tell him. He'll be a jerk. He'll rub her in her face. He'll be terrible.

[Thomas Banks]

And I love how, like, he can't come forward and reveal himself. But they're insulting him and they're saying, yes. You know, the man hath a contemptible spirit.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. You know, that guy, he would just crush her. We all know how. How he is. Don Pedro says, I wish she loved me. I mean, she is one heck of a broad. I wish she'd marry me. I love. I love that they call. They call Benedict a Hector.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's a. He's just a great warrior. He, you know, he'll come in and he'll beat her up. Okay, so when it says, if you've never read a Shakespeare floor play before, so when it says aside, that means two characters are talking to each other. And. And the other people can't hear them. So we have. We have them saying some things loud for Benedict to hear. And then Claudio and Don Pedro are whispering to each other. Quick, put real him in. We got him on the line like so. So, you know, they can hear it.

[Thomas Banks]

And I love when Don Pedro's summing up his thoughts, he says, well, we will hear further of it by your daughter. Let it cool the while. I love Benedict. Well, and I wish I could. Wish he would modestly examine himself to see how much he is. Is unworthy of. So good. I like him so much. He's one of my best friends. And if only he could look in the mirror and see what a schmuck he is, it would just so much better then.

[Angelina Stanford]

Are you sure this is not how we got together?

[Thomas Banks]

Actually. Okay, true story. Yes, I did tell certain friends that we were involved romantically. And certain of them were surprised that you would take notice of me. I mean, they didn't say it in, like, a mean way. They didn't say, wow, but you're such a schmuck. But it was like, Angelina Stanford. Like, the really smart Angelina Stanford. She. She's dating you. And. Yeah, there were conversations like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Anyway, it's said the guy was like, wait, you.

[Thomas Banks]

There was something, I think, that was sort of implied. There was some subtextual criticisms of me and people's tones of voice. It's okay. I, I, I kind of agree with them. So, I mean, you know, hey, I disagree with that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I, I think I've gotten the better out of this deal. All right. So then they say, okay, we've got him. Now we're gonna, we're gonna go and do the same thing for Beatrice. Now, it's really interesting, the language here. Let there be the same net spread for her. Right?

[Thomas Banks]

The hunting metaphor. Continues fishing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. So I was gonna say.

[Thomas Banks]

No, no, you fire away first.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I was gonna say this is a parallel to Don Jon, who's on who's Also not hunting expedition, but he wants to catch you, to kill you and destroy you.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And Ursula and Harrow, when they're speaking about, you know, the success of their, of this gulling that they've done with Beatrice, one of them says to the other, she's limed, I warrant you. Limed. That's a metaphor from catching birds. Bird lime is. It's kind of like glue, almost like the bird gets stuck in.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Anyway, that makes sense. So she. We've caught the bird.

[Angelina Stanford]

So we have double plots of trapping, but one for good and one for ill, right? One's a performance to help two people be. Get together, and the other is to break apart a couple and destroy people. It's just so brilliant. So they say they're laughing to the. You could just kind of imagine that they're sort of bent over, doubled over in laughter, right? And they're like, oh, wait, wait, wait. Let's tell Beatrice to go call Benedict in for dinner. This would be fantastic. So they all leave. And so then we get another Benedict soliloquy, and we see that this guy has changed on the dime. So first he's like, I would never be idiot enough to fall in love. And now he comes forward and he says, this can be no trick. Do you want to. Do you want to read this? Fantastic.

[Thomas Banks]

Certainly Good.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Beatrice lines later, but you got to do Benedict. Well, actually, we can do. Let's start with Benedict's advancing soliloquy. And then let's keep going when Beatrice comes in.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, this can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne. They have the truth of this from Harrow. They seem to pity the lady. It seems her affections have their full bent. Love me. Why it must be requited. I hear how I am censured, they say. I will bear myself proudly if I perceive the love come from her. They say, too, that she will rather die than give any sign of affection. I did never think to marry. I must not seem proud. Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending. They say the lady is fair. Tis a truth. I can bear it witness. And virtuous. Tis so. I cannot reprove it. And wise, but for loving me. By my troth, it is no addition to her wit. Nor no great argument of her folly. For I will be horribly in love with her. I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me. Because I have railed so long against marriage. But doth not the appetite alter again? Changeable, you know. Inconstant. Doth not the appetite alter. A man loves the meat in his youth which he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain. Awe a man from the career of his humour? No. The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor. I did not think I should live till I were married. Here comes Beatrice. By this day, she's a fair lady. I do spy some marks of love in her.

[Angelina Stanford]

Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.

[Thomas Banks]

Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains.

[Angelina Stanford]

I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me. If it had been painful, I would not have come.

[Thomas Banks]

You take pleasure then, in the message?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, just so much as you may take upon a knife's point and choke a doll withal. You have no stomach, senor. Fare you well.

[Thomas Banks]

Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner. There's a double meaning in that. I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me. That's as much as to say any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks. If I do not take pity upon her, I am a villain. If I do not love her, I am a Jew. I will go get her picture.

[Angelina Stanford]

Fantastic. Now, it highlights a couple of things. One is that you can see what you want to see.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes, absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. You can see what you want to see. Which I think is going to double to Claudio. Seeing what he wants to see with Margaret and Harrow. Right. You see what you want to see. The other thing that I think we want to point out is that Benedict did a full 180i in five minutes. In five minutes. And so will Claudio. So will Claudio. They both will. So I think people really misunderstand the Claudio character. Like, how could he have been so in love with her and then so out of love with her? But Benedict's doing the same thing. He's out of love and then in love. Now, they're not exactly the same. And I think Claudio is being presented to us as unstable. But it's also an Elizabethan view that a person who has a sort of extreme personality, they can flip back and forth from one extreme to another.

[Thomas Banks]

Born under the influence of Mercury, perhaps.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, Right. So Claudio falling instantly in love with her and instantly then hates her.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Quicksilver. Yeah, he's quicksilver unstable.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Exactly. Precisely. All right, act three is the Gulling, part two. Now, we're gonna get Beatrice. Now, she does not have a long soliloquy. I noticed. She. She's much quicker to sort of. Okay, this is happening now. All right, so Hera and Ursula, you know, kind of set the stage. And I love this. Of this matter is little Cupid's crafty arrow made that only wounds by hearsay. Now they're making a joke about, you know, falling in love through hearsay. But. But being wounded by hearsay is a theme in this whole play.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, we're going to lay this sweet bait for her. So they do the same thing. They've got the hook. They've got the line. I love that they call it honest slanders. This will be in contrast to Don John, who has dishonest slanders.

[Thomas Banks]

Quite so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, Harrow says some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. And Beatrice, her response is very different than Benedict's. What fire is in mine eyes. Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much contempt farewell and maiden pride, adieu. No glory lives behind the back of such. And Benedict, love on. I will requite thee Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand. If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee to bind our loves, Open a holy band for others say that thou dost deserve. And I believe it better than reportingly.

[Thomas Banks]

And this is the first time she has spoken in poetry, I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Exactly. Okay, so actually, let me wait on that comment because it's also rhymed poetry, notice.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So it's not great poetry. It's not blank verse. That's a good catch. I will have more to say about this in Act 4. There's gonna be much more to say about this in Act 4. The. The movement from Benedict and Beatrice saying, I will never get married to saying, okay, let's fall in love. And there seems to be a change in their language. So we'll come back to that. But what I want to point out here is when she says, I'm going to tame my wild heart. So we have all these parallels with Beatrice and Benedict and Catherine and Petruchio of Taming of the Shrew. And here she's basically saying it, I'm. I'm going to tame my own heart. So in Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio has to teach Kate how to tame her own heart. But Beatrice immediately says, I will tame my heart. She knows that she's been a bit of a shrew to him. And she. But it's just. It's just a pretense, right? And I'm gonna tame it in his loving hand. All right, scene two. This also had some really funny stuff here. So they're all talking about Benedict here and they're like, benedict, you. You look different. What's. What's different about it? He's like, I have a toothache. Now, there's a lot of punning going on because a toothache. There was like, I guess an old wives tales that lovers suffered from toothaches.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Do you know the backstory?

[Thomas Banks]

I don't know, but I. That's. Yeah, that's one of those odd folk beliefs.

[Angelina Stanford]

Has something to do with like the meridian connecting your heart. Kind of like the same thing with the wedding ring. Oh, it's the meridian in that finger connects to your heart. That's why you wear a wedding ring.

[Thomas Banks]

There could be.

[Angelina Stanford]

But anyway, it's probably something like that and all.

[Thomas Banks]

But also, he's taking more care of his appearance. He shaved his beard, he perfumed him. He's wearing civet, which is a very. I think that comes from like the gland of some cat. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. So it's just hilarious. He, again, it's like the.

[Thomas Banks]

He's dressing better. He's wearing product.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he's got product. He comes out and he's all. And they're like, benedict, have you been to the barber? Do you smell him?

[Thomas Banks]

To underline his changeableness, he's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

So Don Pedro here, there is no appearance of fancy in him, unless it be a fancy that he hath to strange disguises as to be a Dutchman today, a Frenchman tomorrow, or in the shape of two countries at once as a German from the waist downward, all slops. And a Spaniard from the hip upwards, no doublet. Unless he have a fancy to this foolery as it appears he hath. He is no fool for fancy, as you would have it appear he is. So he's wearing, like, every different fashion, national fashion, under the sun, dressing as a Frenchman one day and a Spaniard the next.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, but this is good to note. This is another type of mask.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is another type of mask. Right. So he went from, not if you were the last woman on earth, I'd never get married. And now he's a fancy boy.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm buying a new wardrobe.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. But it doesn't quite fit him. That's what we want to know.

[Thomas Banks]

He doesn't know himself.

[Angelina Stanford]

He doesn't know himself. Right. So they're like, you look weird. He's a. It's like a mishmash of, you know, hot guy stuff.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it doesn't quite fit him. So we do. See, Shakespeare's playing with clothes again. So not. Not every time you see clothes being used, is it an intentional disguise? Here, here we have that. He just doesn't know himself. He's trying on a new role, as you know.

[Thomas Banks]

He says to the friends who are teasing him, I am not as I have been. Yes, he knows that he's been overcome by some great and dramatic change.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. He does say that I love when he says, yet is this no charm for the toothache, Old senor, walk outside with me. I've studied eight or nine wise words to speak to you, but these. These hobby horses must not hear. Hobby horses is a buffoon. That's like, you know.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

He wants to talk to Leonato because he obviously wants to talk about Beatrice.

[Thomas Banks]

And enough clowning around.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Get rid of these buffoons. And then they're just cracking up, laughing, saying, this is fantastic now. So we go from one successful goal in the same scene to a second successful goal.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. So John just materializes, as people like that tend to do.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Don Pedro and Claudio both fall forward, hook, line and sink.

[Thomas Banks]

He takes like, 10 lines. This is not like. Yeah, this is not like Iago slowly reeling in.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's see Claudio having a long, like, you know, rake. Like, could this be so. Could it be true? You know, we don't have any of those.

[Thomas Banks]

No, he's not conflicted at all. Oh, my gosh. Just said that she's unfaithful. That must mean she is.

[Angelina Stanford]

So then I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna shame her to death.

[Thomas Banks]

Don Pedro asks, what's the matter? Don John speaking to Claudio means, your lordship to be Married tomorrow. Don Pedro, you know he does. I know. Not that when he knows what I know. Claudio, if there be any impediment, I pray you discover it. Then Don John basically lays the trap out for them in a way that, you know, any half intelligent person would notice. But no, they fall for it, as you said, hook, line and sinker.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So they say she's disloyal. And they're like, who? Who? Her? That's a great line, though. Even she. Leonato's hero. Your hero. Every man's hero. Disloyal How? He's like. The word is too good to paint out her wickedness. I could say she were worse. Think you have a worse title? I will fit her to it. Wonder not till further warrant. So what Lynn's weight to this very thin slander is. See it with your own eyes. Don't trust me. See it with your own eyes.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. Because the eyes never lie.

[Angelina Stanford]

The eyes never lie. Right. Because we can trust how things seem. See? So right back to that Shakespeare, seeming versus being. Okay. And Claudio is easily deceived. May this be so. I will. I will not think it. Don Pedro does. It's okay. So Don Pedro's like, I'm. I know. I don't believe it. I won't believe it till I see it. But Claudio, like, he's ready to believe it. It right there. And he says if I should see anything tonight, why I should not marry her tomorrow, in the congregation where I should wed, there will I shame her. And then Don Pedro says, well, as I wooed for thee to obtain her, I will join with thee to disgrace her. So the stakes are set here.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Are now scene three. We get the counterpart to Don John and the plotters, which is Dogberry and his men. And they are absolutely hilarious. And we're right back to language.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, they're kind of like the. They are to this play what the rude mechanicals are to Midsummer Night's Dream.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I wrote that in the margin. Oh, we tracked high five. Yes. That was good. Yeah. We're having a moment over here. No, exactly. So. So the. The actors in. In Midsummer Night's Dream who are like, you know, the regular tradesmen. And they're just kind of. They're so silly and they don't get the words out also.

[Thomas Banks]

So this is the watch. And you have to understand that this is a world in which there's no such thing as a professional police force. So none of these guys do this for a living. All of these guys were probably Shopkeepers or peasants or something like that. But Dogberry takes his job very seriously.

[Angelina Stanford]

Seriously. So seriously. He thinks he's wise.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he's not.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, but he's a mall cop.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's a mall cop. He's a mall cop. That's well said. So the thing about Dogberry is he's using all the wrong words. Like he said there's a suspicious character. He says there's an auspicious character.

[Thomas Banks]

Malapropisms are kind of his native language.

[Angelina Stanford]

So this is going to tie in to what we've been saying about language. We'll come back to that. So he's what? Here's, here's, here's what's supposed to be happening. What he's supposed to be happening is he's saying there's a big event tomorrow and we, it's our job, as you know, the mall cops here, the private security to make sure everything's going to go off without a hitch tomorrow. So I want you to clear the streets of anything suspicious. And then there's those hilarious lines of well what if they won't go?

[Thomas Banks]

All these procedural questions like what if they won't go?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well then don't, don't do anything. Like if a baby's crying, wake up the nurse, because that's going to disrupt everything. Well, what if I can't wake up the nurse? Well then just do nothing. The baby will cry and that'll wake her up. Like just all these things.

[Thomas Banks]

What if I meet a thief? Well, don't have anything to do with him. Just let him go his way. Because we must not meddle with any such, you know, dishonest men. Is that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's right. Okay, so. So like he says, you are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man of the constable sensible men.

[Thomas Banks]

Is Dogberry, is that just an. A silly sounding clownish name he invented or is there such a thing as a Dogberry?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I don't know. I've never, I've never like some, some.

[Thomas Banks]

Kind of weed or something.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've never read across what the name means. But so there is, there's a double meaning here. This is your charge. You shall comprehend all vagran men. Now what he means is apprehend. Yes, right. Apprehend the bad guys. But the inability of people to comprehend in this play who are the bad guys is actually a very, very.

[Thomas Banks]

He's occasionally wiser than he needs to be.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's accidentally stumbles onto the right meaning. So they're all upside down in this scene, everything's upside down.

[Thomas Banks]

I love when Shakespeare has his, you know, buffoons, his clowns, the names he gives. Hugh Oatcake or George E. Cole.

[Angelina Stanford]

Those were so good. So I thought you would appreciate this little bit of research I did in a letter. CS Lewis, when he was referring to. So in World War II, he was too old to be a soldier, so he was assigned to the Home Guard. And he wrote to people in letters that he felt like he was Dogberry.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, actually, Lewis, in one of his essays, refers to. There was actually the Home Guard became very unpopular in a lot of English towns and villages during World War II because guys started taking themselves too seriously and they started insisting on, like, you know, earlier and earlier curfews and shops and pubs have to close up by, you know, 6pm and everyone has to be in their beds. Can't have any lights on and that kind of thing. So, yeah, like.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, anyway, okay, here's one of the things I'm reminded of, like Dwight Schrute from the Office, you know, when Jim says, absolutely. This is the smallest amount of podcast I've ever seen. Go to someone's like the seed of.

[Thomas Banks]

That character right there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. Okay. Drunk. Drunk with the tiniest bit of power ever. So I'm not going to get into everything Auden says about language because we need to get a little further in the play. But I'll say this about the introduction of Dogberry. He says the great verbal dexterity of Beatrice and Benedict is paralleled by the great verbal ineptitude of Dogberry.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes, That's a perfect way of putting it.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I love this quote. He says Dogberry has, quote, an ineptitude, which it's itself, becomes an art.

[Thomas Banks]

Also very well put. I keep. I keep hearing all these little observations of odds, and I think that should have been me. I should have said that I'll just have to steal them and make them my own.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just no one would know any. All right, so here's the funny thing. An actual plot has erupted also. And it happens off stage.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which that'll be different if you watch any movies. We have an episode coming up of the movies, but the movies don't like to put things off stage. But this would have been off stage. So this is. It's already a fait accompli. Right. It's already happened. And so the two main conspirators are just walking around, they've gotten paid, they're bragging about it, they're drunk, and they're.

[Thomas Banks]

Bragging about Oraccio is living up to his name.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Because that's Spanish for drunk. And yeah, they're just talking about. We pulled off a good one. So that's how the audience is finding out. And then the guard sort of accidentally gets real plotters.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, they. Right, so these guys just. Again, it's kind of like the not so very bright animal falling for the trap, which in this case hasn't even been set. The guards are just kind of standing in the background. They just sit down in front of them.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're like the Three Stooges, right, the Keystone Cops. And they're just bumbling all over each other. And they just randomly suit you guys and say, oh, there's some treason going on there. But they accidentally are true. Now, a few years ago, my son Eli was in a production of Much Ado About Nothing that was put on by his college. And he played the character of Vargas. Is it.

[Thomas Banks]

Is that how you say his name? Verges? I think it's Verges.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, Verges. The character of Verges, Dogberry's assistant. And he was quite hilarious in it. And I'm stuck. I kind of picture that scene, that production, when I'm reading this because they used a lot of physical humor with the constables. I mean, like, he had mismatched knee high socks and just like, you know, they just looked ridiculous. But some of the moms in the audience will appreciate this. So there I was watching my. My son on stage in a Shakespeare performance. And I was thinking back of all the many morning times we had had where we had read Shakespeare aloud. And he didn't tell me that he had done this. But when I got the program and I sat down and I opened it up and each of the actors had a little quote they could have under them. And his quote was, I would like to dedicate this performance to my mother who taught me how to love Shakespeare.

[Thomas Banks]

I was gonna say, if I were your child performing in Shakespeare, and I knew you were in the audience, that would have me sweating, honestly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, no, he was fabulous.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, no, I'm sure he was very fun.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's got the family's comic timing. But anyway, that's for all the moms out there who are slugging it out in morning time and thinking, these seeds I'm planting can't possibly bloom. I did not see that coming at all. That. That he would end up having such a great love of these things. It was. It was a great moment. Okay, so some interesting things about this one. We have Another eavesdropping scene. Right. So the constables are eavesdropping on the conversation with Borachio and Conrad. So this is more noting. Remember again, noting means eavesdropping. The whole play is much ado about noting. Right. Because that's how they would have pronounced it in the Renaissance. Nothing would have been pronounced as noting. Okay, now they have what seems like a throwaway comment, Borachio and Conrad, about different fashions. But there's an interesting reference there. You caught it. And I caught it, too, about Bell's priest. Tell us about that.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, so that is an allusion to the 14th chapter of Daniel, which in the deuterocanonical. Excuse me, the Septuagint version of Daniel. The Greek version of Daniel is one of the deuterocanonical editions. And Bell and the Dragon is kind of an ancient detective story.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, Dorothy Sayers starts off her omnibus of crime with this story as one of the first detective stories.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So there is a dragon in Babylon.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, there's a deception.

[Thomas Banks]

There's a deception.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's how this fits this play. There's a deception going on that people are trying. Bad guys are trying to convince people there's a dragon in the temple.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. And Daniel decides to investigate, and he discovers that actually it's not that. It's people stealing the. The food offered in the. In the temple. And anyway, so he. Daniel, Daniel private detective and prophet solves kill.

[Angelina Stanford]

Daniel solves the. He solves the mystery. And it's. It's a fantastic story. And then also, so this. I really try to pay attention when Shakespeare has little references like that because they often seem throwaway. But if you know the story he's referencing, like, he does this all the time with, gosh, all over the place. In Taming of the Shrew, for example, there's a ton of Chaucer references. And if you know the Chaucer story, then you totally understand what he's doing in the play. If you don't know the Chaucer stories, if you just think that those are throwaway similes, it's like this and like that, that. Then you completely misread the play. So he's referencing, in apparently a throwaway line, the story of Bell, which is about a deception that is almost successfully pulled off. But Daniel figures it out and unravels the whole thing. Now, my mind immediately went to this because. Well, first I'll say this. This is not a theological statement. Protestants. Shakespeare was a Protestant. He knew his apocrypha.

[Thomas Banks]

Was he, though?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, okay, you're right. You're right. Joseph Pierce. Joseph Pierce has another theory. Milton was a Puritan. There you go. And he references the Apocrypha all through. All through Paradise Laws.

[Thomas Banks]

I should say this is just to be as objective as possible. There is not a academic consensus about Shakespeare's religion.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's true. There's just so much we don't know about him. But my point was for the sake of getting the literary references. That's why I say it's not a theological point. You probably need some familiarity with those books because they do show up in Renaissance literature quite a bit, actually.

[Thomas Banks]

Shakespeare, you know, five pages from this dogberry, in this, you know, kind of mock serious moment, he says, a man who touches pitch shall be defiled therewith. Which is a quotation from the Book of Sirach, which Shakespeare uses. I guess this was a verse that occurred to Shakespeare a lot because he has Falstaff also in kind of a mock serious moment, quote this same verse in Henry IV, Part 2. But yes, I think pretty much all Bibles, whether Catholic or Protestant, would include the Apocrypha. I mean, whether or not with the canonical books themselves or as an appendix. And that was the case until probably the early 1800s. So they would have been just better known by. They were better known Protestants, Catholics, alike.

[Angelina Stanford]

Milton, well, he not only references the story of Tobit, but he actually uses it as a microcosm for the whole fall story in Paradise Lost. Okay, so here's where my mind went, because the story of Belle and Daniel solving that crime is the sister story. They go right together with the story of Susanna.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, I like where you're going.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like where I thought you would. Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

I wanted to bring this up myself.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so Susanna is the story of a woman who is falsely accused of committing adultery, just like Herod.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And some men have plotted against her and made up this whole slanderous lie. And she's going to be executed. And Daniel solves the crime and figures out she's been framed.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. He asks these two. These two rabbis who have, you know, or elders who have claimed that she has been an adulteress. So where did you see her being an adulteress? And he questions them apart from each other. And one says, under, you know, the almond tree, and the other says, under this other kind of tree. So their stories don't line up. And.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, classic law and order set up. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

Shakespeare's eldest daughter was named Susanna.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So anyway, I think the reference to Belle is implying also the Susanna reference. So a plot, a deception will be unraveled. That's the Bell. And then also a innocent woman who's falsely accused. That plot will be unraveled too, because this is the story of an innocent woman being falsely accused. That's very good. Yeah, I was kind of proud of myself for that. Okay, so, yeah, so we find out from Borachio that offstage.

[Thomas Banks]

Sorry, can I. Oh, go right ahead. I'm going to go back to Bell and the Dragon. That story is one that I think has had sprouts and offshoots cross culturally even into non Christian and non Jewish cultures. So the great Iranian, the great Persian national epic, the Shahnameh by Firdausi, which is the Persian book of Kings, includes a story in which Iskander, which by the way, is the Persian version of the name Alexander. So it's Alexander the Great this time. There's some mystery involving a dragon. And he uses the same means that Daniel does to solve this problem by sprinkling the dust. Yeah, like the cakes or something like that. Cakes mixed with. With bitumen, which is pitch. So it's, it's a story that travels across many nations. Anyway, that's. I just found that kind of thing interesting.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I was just thinking, though, the Dogberry's reference about being caught in the pitch, then that applies to the, the Bell story as well.

[Thomas Banks]

In, you know, in a way.

[Angelina Stanford]

In a way. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, we, I think we fail to understand how the oral tradition worked because we're such a, you know, printing press age that, that lots of stories get retold orally and kind of mesh with other stories. And so these, the associating these stories, if you understand the oral tradition, it's not the leap that it might sound like.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I mean, us.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's always like, well, you have to prove to me Shakespeare owned this book and read it like. Well, that's not how it worked in the pre printing press era.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I was going to say. I mean, to, to illustrate that even further afield, there's a. Also a Persian equivalent of the Arthurian legend of Kristen and Isold.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, fascinating.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's strange, but yeah, there's. These stories do kind of line up. They have cousins in.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, they absolutely do. They absolutely do. Okay. So we find out through a conversation with Borachio and Conrad that he had his evening with Margaret, Claudio and Don Pedro are positioned where they can't really see what's going on, but. Don't. But Borachio is yelling out the name Harrow. Harrow. And so Claudio sees enough to be convinced this is. This is true. Now, of course, we're over here. Like, come on. Really? Idiot. Like, this is what you think. Your fiance is just like, you know, on the street publicly having a rendezvous. But guys fall for things. And we are supposed to see Claudio as unstable. There's gonna be so much more we say about this when we get into Acts 4 and 5. But he turns on a dime. That's what you have to know about an unstable person. So if you're the kind of person who falls in love at first sight, you're going to be the kind of person who falls out of love at first sight. And if you're. I'm so in love, it's, you know, you snap your fingers and now it's, I hate you so much, I wish you were dead. And you see that kind of turn on the dime in a lot of Shakespeare plays.

[Thomas Banks]

So the next scene where we have these ladies talking about, you know, what clothes to wear at the wedding, et cetera, and you're trying on different dresses and the, like. We talked about how Margaret kind of seems like Juliet's nurse.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very much so. That kind of body thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. A woman who's. Yeah. An experienced woman, we'll say.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so a few thoughts about that. Let's go back to Shakespeare's. This setup that Shakespeare uses. I have my ultra romantic characters and I have my anti romancy characters. In this play, the anti romantic characters are Benedict and Beatrice, who go around saying things like, why would I get married? Benedict's like, if I got married, I would just get cuckolded and cheated on. So they have that kind of hard nose why I won't get married in other plays. Romeo and Juliet is an example of that. The way the ultra romantic and the anti romantic play out is just a tad bit different. So you have Romeo, for example, who's in love with love, right? So he goes to the party because he's madly in love with Rosaline. And then he sees Juliet and he's like. He's like, rosalind who? And he's on to the next girl, right? So Romeo's just in love with love, so he's that ultra romantic.

[Thomas Banks]

Do you think that maybe Rosalind is the luckiest character in Romeo and Juliet?

[Angelina Stanford]

In all of Shakespeare, perhaps? Yeah. But Romeo and Juliet talk about love in its platonic, ideal form, right? So they're in love with love. It's so Pure. She's an angel in the Romeo. Don't worry, I'll speak about this euphemistically. In the Romeo and Juliet play, the characters that, you know, counterpose that the. All the anti romantic characters are the nurse and Mercutio who are cynical. Cynical, crude and crude and yeah, cynical and crude. They. So let's just put it this way. If Romeo is all about I'm in love with love and she's an angel and the idea of we're two souls who have melded, Mercutio and the nurse are going to be making comments about how it's not two souls that are melding, it's two bodies that are melting, right? So they're going to have this very, very cynical body. You know, you're just raging hormones kind of, kind of approach. And Shakespeare was going to end up rejecting both of those extremes as he will hear. But you'll see that there's just variations of it. So this scene where Margaret is making wedding night jokes, she's making PG13 wedding night jokes jokes. She is very much channeling the nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

[Thomas Banks]

Actually I think there's at least one line. I'm not going to repeat it, but.

[Angelina Stanford]

That'S straight out of it.

[Thomas Banks]

Basically. I think the nurse tells the same joke.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Harrow's very in love with love, right? Because she doesn't know Claudio. How could she be in love with him? She's in love with love. And the nurse is, is making that anti romantic comment about the wedding night. We'll leave it at that. But Beatrice says something very interesting. So just like Claudio, I'm sorry, Benedict comes in and his friends are like, well, you look different. He's like, I'm not the same man I was. Beatrice comes in very similarly and they're like, what's going on with you? And she says, I'm all out of tune. So this fits with our harmony music dance. And we'll talk more about that as we get further into the play. We'll just note here that she's feeling out of tune. And they're making jokes about, well, you need a cardist. Benedictus. So that's an herb. This herb will make you feel better. She's like, benedictus. Why are you saying be addictive juice? What have you heard?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, no, I was really just talking about the herb. It's like if the guy's initials were CVS or something like that. Sorry, that was a lame comparison.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. And then we get to scene five, which is just one of these heartbreaking scenes because the plot kind of unravels.

[Thomas Banks]

You want to tear your hair out. Yeah. It's like if Leonardo just had five minutes. Or if a Dogberry knew how to say no, this is actually important.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just put two words together. That's right. But his language is confused and that's all part of the disorder of the.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, no. I love this part, though. So, like Leonardo's, he's in a rush. I mean, you know, he has to give the bride away. Neighbours, you are tedious, Dogberry, it pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor duke's officers. But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow all of it on your worship, Leonardo, all thy tediousness on me.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so the frustrating part is they've captured the bad guys, okay? They could have ended the plot before. Whatever is going to happen to Harrow at this wedding in Act 4. So he's like, we captured these suspicious guys, something's up. And Leonardo's like, you're not making any sense. Get out of my face. I'm bitching busy. And so they just. He just shoos them away, shoes them away. And that's it. That's it. We caught two auspicious persons. We comprehended two auspicious persons today.

[Thomas Banks]

And. And they know that they have to give these guys some kind of trial. And of course, Dogberry, who's all about proceduralism. Go, good partner. Go get you Francis Seacole. Bid him bring Pen and Inkhorn to the jail. We are now to examination these men, Verges. And we must do it wisely. Dogberry, we will spare for no wit, I warrant you. Here's that shall drive some of them to a noncome. Only get the learned writer to act. Set down our excommunication and meet me at the jail.

[Angelina Stanford]

We'll talk about this.

[Thomas Banks]

He's gonna give expert testimony. We've been living for this moment.

[Angelina Stanford]

The one guy who can read and write. Go get him. Tell him to bring pen and paper. This is gonna be very, very official. I. We're gonna talk about this more when we do the episode on the film versions. But Michael Keaton as Dogberry is just brilliant. Absolutely.

[Thomas Banks]

He's one of the best things in the movie.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hilarious. Hilarious, Hilarious. All right, well, that brings us to Act 4. So let me say just a couple of things because we haven't talked about this yet. The shape of a comedy. So stories have shapes. And if you think about the Greek drama, masks of the frowny face and the smiley face. That's your two shapes of stories. The frowny face is the tragedy and the smiley face is the comedy. So I think I've mentioned before that comedy doesn't mean haha funny because that's what a farce is. And there's actually comic moments like that in all of Shakespeare's plays, the histories, the tragedies, not just exclusively comedy. We think of comedy as a move that's going to make me laugh. But that's not what it means. Comedy means the shape. So here we are in Act 3. All of Shakespeare's plays have five acts and they all follow this, this basic shape. So in the comedy, you're going to have the character start up at the top of the U and they are going to, in the first three acts, slide down the U. Sometime around the end of Act 3 or the beginning of Act 4, they will hit the bottom of that U and then there will be a miraculous turn and they will make it back up the U. And that bottom of the U moment which is coming up in Act 4 in this play has been called the almost tragedy. That that's where you're like, oh, how are they going to get out of this? I mean, sometimes I'll even flip back and say, am I actually reading a comedy or a tragedy? Which one is this? Because there's no way that this is. This is going to work out. So we'll see Shakespeare's use of that comic shape and how he's going to play with that in here. Typically in a Shakespeare play, the climax comes at the end of Act 3. So a lot of times it comes in a different place than we think it's going to come in here. It's very interesting because what happens in Act 4, I forgot I thought it was in Act 3. I was surprised when we read Act 3 and the thing hadn't happened yet because I thought that was the climax. But it's not the climax of the play because he always puts the climax at the end of Act 3. And if you know this, it'll be very telling if you go look for it. The climax then is Dogberry's failure to communicate. Dogberry's misuse of language that will not allow them to unravel it. That's the climax. Everything that's going to happen after that is because of that failure of language. That is. That's a whole other layer that's hitting me this time around is. And I think it's probably because I'm working On my well noted language.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, thank you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Nice, nice. Much ado about noting. But I think it's because I've been doing so much research on language for my conference talk that it's striking me how much this play is about. Is about language. So we'll see and we'll talk more about what happens. Because in a comedy, what happens with that when the characters are at the top of the U and they go down the U is you're going to see a breakup of a community. So we know already that Don John has said if this plot goes well, not only I'm going to break up Claudio and Harold, I'm gonna. Leonardo's gonna drop dead. Well, he's the Duke of that town, so that would be total chaos for that area. They were going to cause trouble to Don Pedro. Basically, what he's hoping for is to refight that civil war, but on different grounds. So he's fomenting the same kind of.

[Thomas Banks]

Very good, Very good. Thank you.

[Angelina Stanford]

So. So Northrop Fry always points out that what's happening in the comedy is a breakup of a community. I won't say everything that's going to happen in this play, but if you connect what I just said about the breakup of a community with the theme of harmony and music, then that tracks, right? Harmony, the symphony, the orchestra, the choir. That's a community functioning together. And you're going to watch that community break apart. So now we're going to go into disharmony and we can look for images of that. And then we'll see what Shakespeare is going to do to re establish that harmony. All right, well, next week we'll do Acts 4 and 5, and then we'll have Atlee on the next week to talk about film versions and different adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing. Yes, you're looking over my shoulder. I have loads of notes, but I'm not going to be sharing them till the next episode.

[Thomas Banks]

Written a Bible there.

[Angelina Stanford]

I have, you know, me with apocrypha thrown in my overachieving self. All right, well, this has been a hoot. I have. Oh, man, I just have so much. I love talking about Shakespeare with you. Can I just say that?

[Thomas Banks]

Likewise, Ms. Stanford. Likewise.

[Angelina Stanford]

So why do we not do this more?

[Thomas Banks]

I know.

[Angelina Stanford]

You'll have no idea how much fun we're having around here when we're in separate rooms of the house reading Shakespeare, texting our comments to each other, just having a ball. Having a ball.

[Thomas Banks]

Amen.

[Angelina Stanford]

I hope you guys are enjoying this play. I hope that the things we're saying are that you're having lots of light bulb moments, lots of connections, and what I really hope is you're thinking, oh, that's why in Twelfth Night, blah blah blah, that's why, as you like it, blah blah blah. Okay, I get it now. I get it now. All right, well remember, you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find that Alice webinar to sign up for Jen Rogers mini class to sign up for our conference to peruse all of our back catalog, you can go to the the Literary Dot Life for show notes and our commonplace quotes. Stick around to the end of this episode. Mr. Banks has a special poem selected. And as always, if you want to support this podcast because we are ad free and 100 member supported, you go to patreon.com backslash the literary life to join our Patreon we have a number of different levels. Even at the five dollar a month level you help us pay KL and our production team. It's expensive to put together a podcast and we really, really appreciate all your support. And of course you get access to many bonus features and every every level gets access to the Patreon Forum, which is a fantastic alternative to other maybe not so friendly places on the Internet. We have enjoyed it greatly. Well, until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories and Shakespeare 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 [e-mail]. 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.

[Thomas Banks]

Maiden name by Philip Larkin, Marrying left your maiden name disused, its five light sounds no longer mean your face, your voice, and all your variants of grace. For since you were so thankfully confused by law with someone else, you cannot be semantically the same as that young beauty. It was of her that these two words were used. Now it's a phrase applicable to no one, lying just where you left it, scattered through old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon. Then is it scentless weightless, strengthless, wholly untruthful. Try whispering it slowly. No, it means you. Or sense your past and gone. It means what we feel now about you then how beautiful you were and near and young. So vivid you might still be there among those first few days unfinger marked again. So your old name shelters our faithfulness instead of losing shape and meaningless with your depreciating luggage laden.