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Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
01:16:54
Jeff and Rebecca take on one of Shakespeare's best–and best-known–comedies, Much Ado About Nothing
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- [00:00]
A
This episode of Zero to well Read is brought to you by ThriftBooks.com with more than 19 million new and used books, ThriftBooks.com is a place where you can read more and spend less. Not just books, but also movies, games, gifts and other sorts of things. With Much Ado About Nothing, which is the subject of today's episode, there's lots to choose from. You can get big concordances, all the Shakespeare in one huge volume. But with something like Much Ado About Nothing, which maybe you want to read on a beautiful spring day, throw it in your bag, prop it open, crack that spine, really live in it. You can get something great for five or six bucks here. Movies too. At the same time, there's of course the great Kenneth Branagh edition I discovered poking around on Thriftbooks.com, there's a much Ado About Nothing film starring Sam Watterson as Benedict. I didn't even know this existed. That's the kind of stuff you can find out on thriftbooks.com thanks so much for them for sponsoring this season of of Zero to well Read. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books and sometimes plays Rebecca you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:11]
B
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're taking on the OG of rom coms, William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. And before we jump in, you can click the link in our Show Notes to sign up for our free newsletter. A colleague, Vanessa Diaz, fleshes that out with all sorts of interesting show notes, information information about the work that we're discussing, some of the best quotes from the show trivia. It's a really good time that's free to subscribe or you can become a member and get early ad free access to our episodes and bonus content@patreon.com 02
- [01:42]
A
well read and whenever you can, if you have a moment, what you do it because it doesn't take any time. You can leave a rating wherever you're listening for this show and if you've got a little bit longer, leave a review and you can always email us at 0 to well read bookriot.com we're going to do a mailbag episode coming up pretty quick. Will that be out by the time is out? Rebecca I realize I can't remember what calendar dates happen. At any rate, if it's already been out, you'll be in line for the next one when we go back. We read all these emails. I respond to Almost all of them. People always send us interesting things about. Here's a link to an interview or here's something you maybe didn't know or here's my favorite point. And Jeff, boy, you looked good in your hat. No, wait, they don't ever write that.
- [02:25]
B
Oh, but what a delight it would be if they did. Somebody out there please tell Jeff how nice he looks in his hat. Boy, you can hear that like this man is wearing a good hat today.
- [02:36]
A
There you go. Thank you very much for saying that today. A first for us, which is that it's not the first for us to come talk about Shakespeare. We did Hamlet in the fall and as we were putting together the year and our sort of first pass at the, the great works, plus some others that we're interested in talking about, plus cultural phenomenon, we, we realized that we did feel like we needed to get another Shakespeare and not just another Shakespeare, but a comedy. Right. Because we did Hamlet, which is the greatest of the tragedies, greatest on quotation marks. We can, we can fight about that forever. But the other side of the Shakespearean coin, he has a three sided coin, which I'll talk about in a second. And really that's the only kind of mixed metaphor you you could use for a singularity like Shakespeare. But the really other side the obverse is the high comedies. And Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite of the three sort of high comedies along with Twelfth Night is as yous Like It. Before we get into the problem comedies, but after the earlier stuff, anyway, I'll talk a little more about Shakespeare. But this represents Shakespeare, I think at his most fun. Rebecca. And I think this is important to remember that Shakespeare is fun. There are fun moments in Hamlet, but you wouldn't say that's a great hanging like Romeo and Juliet, like so many of the plays. There are some, there are some of the plays that are. That have less fun. I'm trying to think of like Richard II and Othello, but this is the merriest version of Shakespeare and it's not without its sadness and melancholy and else. But I think it's helpful when we're talking about these great works, especially older stuff. This is 5 century olds and when we get to Homer or you know, the Sophocles, which we've done some of the earlier stuff, that these are humans and they're fun and messy and light hearted by turn and can be. And that's one of the reasons I think it's worth doing another Shakespeare so soon. Did I get that? Mostly Right. Or what else to say about why to return to Much Ado here.
- [04:29]
B
Exactly. That we wanted to do a comedy after having done one of the tragedies or having done the greatest tragedy. And when I asked you about, like, do you care which comedy? Here's what I'm thinking about for programming. You immediately went, benedick and Beatrice, man, we have to do Much Ado about nothing. And I was like, okay, great. No argument from me. I kind of think about this show in semesters, even though it's just a continuous feed. But I think about what are we doing for the spring, what are we doing in the summer, and then what are we going to do fall and winter? And I kind of think we might do a Shakespeare every semester, at least until we run out of the ones that we have a lot of affection for. And you know, the reason that we talk about Shakespeare or one of the reasons that we talk about him as the greatest to ever do it, is not just the language. It's that the language. Language has to do something. And what he does with the language is capture humanity. And Hamlet captures it in angst and grief and love and all of the ways those things are connected. Much Ado About Nothing captures us at our like, gossipiest, messiest, but also angst and love and plotting and scheming, like all of the things that underpin human emotions. And like, that is what makes these so wonderful to read and so much fun to engage with, is that 500 years later they still feel so true.
- [05:46]
A
Yeah. And I'll let you do your synopsis work here in just a second. But as we get into it, the thing that I'm here for especially, and I think the think in the wides important stage that will lead us into the future is the Beatrice and Benedict pairing, which is, you know, it's the first and best. If you were to ask this particular lover of sparring lovers, which is my favorite kind, that is the thing that's carried forward, but there's a lot else going on here too. This is as light of a Shakespeare as you're going to get. I mean, some of the other stuff is more party, but I think this is just the most straight up fun. And the plot is going to do plot things like a comedy is going to do, but you're really not here for the repot, Rebecca. But such as it is, what is this story actually about?
- [06:29]
B
It's a tale of two love stories. We have Claudio and Hero who fall in love at first sight and everybody around them is on board for it, Hero's father, Leonato, who's the governor of Messina, gives his endorsement. Then there's Don Pedro, who is the prince that Claudio reports to and has been off at war with. Then you get Don Pedro's illegitimate brother, Don John, who is in his villain era. They call him Don John the bastard. And he decides to sabotage the union by tricking Claudio into thinking that Hero has been unfaithful. So that's one plot. And then on the other side, we have Benedick and Beatrice, who they seem like everybody, or they seem to everybody around them, like they're the perfect match. They're witty, they're stubbornly independent, and both of them insist that they will never get married. But, like, meddlers are going to meddle. And everyone around them plots to play Cupid and tell Benedick and Beatrice each that the other is in love with them. It's that good old fashioned third grade like, hey, he really has a crush on you thing. And so shenanigans ensue. Claudio calls off the wedding to Hero because he thinks that she's cheating on him. Hero faints at the shock of it. Claudio then believes that Hero is dead, so he agrees to marry Leonato's niece as a replacement. And I have commentary on that to get to later in the show. But, like, surprise, it's really Hero who's under the veil. So Claudio and Hero end up together. Don John the bastard gets found out by a bumbling constable named Dogberry. Like one of the great Shakespearean character names.
- [08:02]
A
It sounds like should be a comic from like the 1950s comic strip. Like, this is Dogberry. Yeah.
- [08:08]
B
And then Benedict and Beatrice fall for the plot that their friends have set for them. Just like hook, line and sinker. They end up in love with each other. And we get a double wedding and happily ever after.
- [08:18]
A
And we get dancing almost in a Bollywood style, like where you just like trumpets start and then everyone dances at the end. So there's kind of a mesh of two kinds of plots. The Claudio Hero plot is this. More. That's one that's inherited a little bit from an Italian kind of really set up. Almost a paint by numbers kind of a plot where there's a misunderstanding and you fake a death and then you put some under a veil and you do a little switcheroo at the same time. Also, I'm gonna insert an early stray thought that I just had. Boy, they really didn't know much about medicine because if a woman fainted, you're like, I guess she's dead and everyone. Yeah, I guess she is. Boy, they really didn't know what we were doing here.
- [08:55]
B
Yeah, it's just believable that she's dead from surprise.
- [08:59]
A
So anyway, so that's what we get into here, why it's important. All right, well, this leaves me in a bit of a bind because we have done already a Shakespeare, and we did with Hamlet, we did a bunch of this Shakespeare stuff. And I don't want to repeat a lot of that, but let me start off with just why this particular play. And then we can do a little bit of the. More of the Shakespearean stuff of this is written during his highest of high periods. And I say right smack dab in the middle of the greatest 10 year run in literary history. And just to give you some sense of what we're talking about here, so we're dating this at about 1598 into 1599. Again, we don't really know exactly this because the First Folio wasn't dated. There was this guy, Francis mayer, had a 1598 list of Shakespeare plays. But it's very, it's, it's, it's messy. But if we go from 1595 to 1605, here's what we're talking about, right? We start in 1595. I'm going to kick it off with Midsummer's Night Dream. Then we go Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, King John, the Merchant of Venice, Henry 4, Part 1 and 2 Henry, Much Ado About Nothing, which is late 1598, Henry 5, as yous Like It, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, the Merry Wise of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and All's well that Ends well. Well, I kind of rounds us out in 1605. So this is right in the middle. And it comes sandwiched, I think, interestingly, between the Henry plays and Julius Caesar and then Hamlet's right after. So it's real close in this high period. And this is the highest of high periods here. And I still don't know what to do with this. I really don't know what to do with it.
- [10:40]
B
That Shakespeare was prolific. But when you rattle it off that way, it really drives it home.
- [10:46]
A
Like just having some fun camera issues here. Everyone's gonna be like, what the hell is going on? All right, go ahead, Rebecca. Yeah, go ahead.
- [10:53]
B
Yeah, it just, it really drives it home what prolific looked like on him. And some of this, maybe a lot of it, is motivated by money that he's got to keep churning out new plays for his company to put on so that they can make money. And keep having audiences come back for something fresh like these books are. They're. The plays are not being really like packaged and sold as popular books. That's not his income source. You got to get the bodies in the door. They want to see something new. But that he could be this prolific and this good at the same time just knocks my socks off every time I'm reminded of it.
- [11:25]
A
Yeah. And then it's a self fulfilling prophecy thing because like, you know, now we think of Shakespeare, like, look at these great plays and they're all jammed in here, but just the work by itself is pretty stunning. But what I'm trying to say here with Much about Do Nothing, Hamlet and Much Ado were putting together sort of high points of Shakespeare and the chronology kind of bears it out at the same time. They're written around the same time. Stuff that happens a little bit later gets darker. Measure for measure. And the comedies that come after are called problem comedies. And maybe once we get to measuring Measure where he was Windsor, we can talk about that. And then King Lear and Macbeth and the tragedies really get sadder and so do the histories at the same time. So probably still on our Shakespeare mini syllabus to do a problem comedy and to do one of the late, you know, like something like the Tempest and then to do one of the histories, which we haven't done yet at the same time in terms of comedy, this is also being invented, the modern Elizabethan comedy at the same time here. And one thing we want to know about Shakespeare, at least for this, is that we again go listen to Hamlet episode. We're not going to redo the whole thing. If you want to do a mini Shakespeare course about who he is, we did a really good job. I would say we did a really nice job that turned out here. But so much is going on the same time that allows him to be in a position to be thought of the greatest of all time. Like early medicine, the Renaissance Queen Elizabeth herself. You know, we know just enough to know what we don't know. And there's this flourishing of activity and sort of a loosening of the church's grip over storytelling, especially when it comes into the theater. Right. There's not a lot of God stuff here, like we're getting married and like, you know, whatever, but we're not subject to sin. That is not the thing we're really talking about here. We're talking about a humanist understanding of love. And there are antecedents for the well matched pair, like a love plot that go Back sort of to, I don't know, probably Penelope and Odysseus might be the first when we think of a well matched couple, even though they were probably married to join a couple of Greek city states. But this idea of Beatrice and Benedict being a good fit and how they figure out they're a good fit and what a good fit actually means, what we're looking for in a romantic partner. Even the nature of courtship itself is put in contrast. Like that's the Claudia hero foil for the Beatrice and Benedict, a much more conventional boy, ain't she Good looking boy, ain't he attractive Prince boy. That seems like a good match to some other kind of understanding of how one might court another person, how one might understand what they, what they have to bring to the table, what someone else has to bring to the table. That there's a table to bring stuff to at all. That's not just about dowries, Rebecca.
- [14:01]
B
Right.
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A
It's very cool.
- [14:02]
B
Yeah. And you know, Benedick and Beatrice always remind me of the sonnet about the marriage of true minds about people that are really coming together from a more intellectual or personality based connection. And there are a lot of ways to read that sonnet because it's Shakespeare. So there are a lot of ways to read everything. But I think one thing that is inarguable here is Benedick and Beatrice as the like originals of rom com banter. Their vibe has inspired literal centuries of stories, most notably Elizabeth, Benedict Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and then Scarlett O' Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind and like and then dozens and dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of examples like Emily Henry could never, but she's tried trying to. And the origins of that are Benedick and Beatrice.
- [14:50]
A
Yeah. And it's I that is important to remember too. It's like probably someone would have invented this otherwise down the road like kind of like in physics where there's some logic to this. But as we get out of a Christian tradition, as we get out of a sort of God oriented or supernatural oriented and marriage oriented just for, you know, procreation and monetary value, the idea of love, that is also not about necessarily about physical desire because Benedict and Beatrice have the hots for each other, but they have the word hots for each other. And I think that's important here. Like that's the primary mode of their understanding. And it's much more of an. They have an intellectual desire for each other that frankly is on the page from the first time Beatrice Asked about Benedict. Right. It's like, there's a couple ways you can play this. I'll do another straight thought here where Benedick is coming back from war with Claudio and everything's gone well, and they're, you know, kind of the conquering heroes. And even we're told, like, not even that many people died. Isn't it great? It's like, yeah, it's even better when we win and not too many people die. And Beatrice right away is like, how'd Benedict comport himself? And, like, she managed to get some barbs in. And the way this is usually done is where it's mocking, but you have a sense of the twinkle in her eye. And then when Benedict come back in their first jousting, there's a twinkle in their eye and that they have found their. What's it called? Their merry war, their sort of ongoing marry war, to be as fulfilling as, like, just doing it would be. Right. Like, we talk like it's sort of the opposite of Twilight, where they sort of stare at each other and want to do it. This is like they're kind of getting a lot of the relationship out in the open. They're kind of getting what they want out of it already, intellectual by intellectual. Yeah, intellectual. Or it's maybe just in. It's intercourse without the sexual part. Right. And I always imagine this is one reason they're so happy being bachelor and bachelorette is they know they have each other to sort of be bachelor and bachelorette with. And they can have these interchanges. They can get the word. They can get their word sex thing on and then go away for a while and come back to do it over and over again. So I think that's one of the fun things for me about this. And, you know, a lot of times, this is what happens in the Pride and Prejudice or Gone with the Wind or the Nora Ephron which you have there, which I think a little bit later we'll talk to. It's like the con. The physical consummation is almost. I don't want to say this without being. Saying something, but it's kind of a letdown because we've done the fun stuff already of the. Of the wordplay and the fighting and the jousting and the banter, and that's the inexorable end, and that's where it happens to the marriage bed rather than, you know, premarital sex or whatever, like When Harry Met Sally. But the fun thing is the courting and the most fun version of this Courting is to hyper literate, super smart, extraordinarily well written characters having to go at each other for, you know, three and a half acts.
- [17:39]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that contemporary rom coms, both on page and screen are trying to do is the people who have the word hots for each other that it needs to be believable that they're into each other before they fall in bed with each other. We need to understand why these people are so attracted to each other. It's not just like, you're hot, I'm hot, let's go bang it out. And it's also like, it has to be so grounded in believable intelligence, believable connection to each other. And this is not what romance readers today would call enemies to lovers. Like, they are not really enemies. There's this grounding.
- [18:17]
A
Yeah, I don't think so.
- [18:18]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like the formal enemies to lovers plot is more of like, they've really hated each other for some reason or one of them's hated the other one and then they fall in love. And this is, is more of, as you're saying, like, it's friendly jousting there is real whether they can admit it to each other or not, affection for the other one as the object of this jousting and as someone who can return the volley. You know, like, each of them is quick and you kind of get the impression that they've like, if they were in contemporary times, they would have been on a lot of dates with people that they're like, they were just not that interesting. They couldn't keep up with me. But they like, each of them likes that the other one can keep up. And I think you're onto something there with the idea that maybe they know, like, they're in no hurry to get married because is that really going to hold up to the fun that they're having while they can have this verbal jousting with each other?
- [19:07]
A
And it's a different plot, say if Beatrice is betrothed or Benedict gets married. Because, you know, if either of them in this play had a suitor, that person would be the most hated person in the history of all time for the other party. Right. Like, this is the kind of relationship where if they were in a relationship and they saw how they bantered back and forth, their significant be like, what is that about? You know, there is something going on here. So now there's a version, I guess I've never seen this done where you can play it as if they actually hate each Other, like, there's a lot of animosity, but I almost think the language doesn't allow that. I think it's fun to really allow.
- [19:40]
B
I think that's a misreading. Yeah, I think there's real affection for each other here.
- [19:46]
A
I think it's important with Shakespeare too. Again, this is not gonna be. This is not going to ring your modern gender role bells in any kind of way. But if you put it in place, what Beatrice, the. The role she is given here and the line she is given and some of the statious stuff she says about men is really, I don't want to say revolutionary for the time, but it's transgressive, it's subversive for the day. And that's the best you can do, right, is to be transgressive, subversive for your day. I've got a couple of quotes here just like, dudes ain't worth is. It comes out of her mouth several times, essentially in various versions of it.
- [20:24]
B
One of my notes was that Shakespeare was really early on. The toxic masculinity tip.
- [20:29]
A
Right. And that, I think holds up. I think that rings a lot of bells even now. Now, again, it's not going to read like someone writing today with a modern sensibility, but it does allow it to survive into the present in a way. A lot of things don't that have more conventional moralities of the day or conventional places or. You know, one of the reasons some of these sort of romance plots don't really hold up to a modern reader is because they're stale as shit when it comes to our modern understanding of gender equality.
- [20:57]
B
And Beatrice is, I guess, technically a spinster by the time this is coming out. There's this long history of older actors playing Benedick and Beatrice. Like sometimes pretty old actors, not just like 30s or 40s, where everybody else in these stories is in their 20s, but like actors in their 50s, 60s, 70s playing Benedick and Beatrice. And the fact that you can port that story into really any stage of life and say, here is some. Someone who never got married, especially Beatrice, this woman who never got married, she never felt the need to until she met a man who could hang with her really is potent and stays relevant 500 years later.
- [21:36]
A
Yeah, Benedict at one time, at one point says, well, I never see a three score bachelor like a three score bachelor again. Which means 60 would suggest that he could be 60. Right? I mean, maybe he's talking about people older themselves, but there's nothing in the text. And I look Pretty closely at it this time. That precludes this being older, as old as you want kind of folks at the same time. And, you know, Beatrice. Neither Beatrice nor Benedict are large. Are very often described for their physical or economic attributes whatsoever. That really doesn't come to bear. Like, Benedict even has this really funny monologue where he's talking about, like, what kind of woman would be right for him. And it becomes an impossible ideal. And at the end, he says, and I'll let God decide what color of her hair. Right. Which is almost like he's acknowledging it's impossible standards. But, like, the physical thing doesn't really matter because being modest and chaste and blah, blah, blah. But she doesn't have to be, you know, a smoke show. And Benedict is not presented as particularly physically attractive. And, you know, he seems. He is a attached to and attended upon greater sort of lords and princes or whatever. So that part's pretty cool, I think, to see.
- [22:42]
B
Yeah, I really liked that. That you can imagine if they're alive today, they've got their little list, the things that they're looking for in an ideal partner. And that it's. Starts with, like, smart, funny, and then you get to attractive much further down the list. That intellectual capacity and emotional connection is the language we would use for it today. But Shakespeare's laying that right out that, like, these are people who, you know, you want somebody that you're never going to get tired of talking to. And that's what if they're going to get married and go through all the hassle of it. And what they perceive to be the hassle of it, it's got to be worth it in that way. Someone who's going to stay interesting.
- [23:18]
A
Yeah. And it compares like the switcheroo you talk about where Hero, quote, unquote, dies. And that's one way they get Claudio and his retinue to come back to the wedding altar. And Hero is just sort of replaceable. You put the veil down and she shuts up. It's like, I'll marry whatever, as long as she's right.
- [23:34]
B
The right that Leonato is like, well, I have this niece you can marry. You know, she's not the same as Hero, but she's pretty cute, too. And Claudio goes for it immediately. I thought really hangs a lantern on how much. For those people, marriage is a transcendence, a business agreement. He's not just falling down with woe that he can't marry this woman that he's in love with for who she is. It's the Connections that they have. They have the hots for each other because they've seen each other across the room. And that's really it. And that contrast between them and the mode that Claudio and Hero are in is the common mode of the day versus Benedick and Beatrice, who do the love marriage thing. That's pretty revolutionary at the time. And also not for nothing is how Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway end up up with each other.
- [24:22]
A
Yeah, I had that in my stray thought that I forgot to write down is in the. In the world of Hamnet. Now, seeing that Ham. Excuse me, seeing that Shakespeare, well, that's. That's a Freudian slip that I think of him Shakespeare being the same person. To think of Shakespeare being able to write a relationship like this, it gives credence to a meetings of the mind. Anne Hathaway, William Shakespeare pairing. Like we don't have any evidence for it, but. Except that we do, which is this kind of relationship. The imagines of though also we get other kinds of relationships between men and women that aren't so amazing. I mean, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. I don't know what you want to do with that, but at least it gives some fuel to this speculative fire about how Shakespeare himself might have imagined an ideal pairing of two romantic partners. Also just I guess on the logistical front to imagine the moment of these things being performed. Remember, in Shakespeare's lifetime, these were not available as plays. It wasn't until the First Folio after his death. This Much Ado About Nothing is in the First Folio. There's not a lot of discussion about the text. When the Hamlet we talked about, like there's like four different editions and the. The full edition, if you include everything that someone has identified as Hamlet is like four and a half hours long to my understanding. I did some. I went through my notes and some of my old textbooks and stuff, and I didn't see a lot of that for Much Ado About Nothing. This is a quick one too, Rebecca. It's a. Like, I read this in like an hour. Like I was flying through it. That's also to know also when it's performed. These are all dudes in this day and age, right? Just. Just to remember the mode and get yourself into the mindset of a lot of the fun I think for people watching this at the time is we get a lot of masking, but there's like mult, then there's like meta levels of masking of a dude playing a lady who's playing a dude who's playing Another lady, like some of the farces, like, really get off their rocker about who's playing what. But this is one, I think this one especially, I have this down in a hot take is I very, very, very, very much thing seeing a performance of this is the canonical way to do it for a lot of Shakespeare. I'm like, you read it so you can do the language. This certainly bears close reading of the Benedict and Beatrice stuff especially. But it's different than Julius Caesar or some of these other things where the language is really heightened and you want to dig into a Hamlet monologue. Like, yeah, a lot of the fun of this is the fun of it. And that's best on stage or on the screen.
- [26:31]
B
And it's so quick. I had some extra time and I like, I really love this one. So I wanted to invest in it. This was the first time I had read it since high school. And as I got back into the text, I was like, oh, right. I remember really liking this. I like these people. And I wanted to dwell in the story. So I did my old favorite thing. After I read it, I went back and listened to a full cast audio production.
- [26:52]
A
Oh, terrible.
- [26:54]
B
It was good. There are several available, but the BBC has one that has like little tiny abridgments. Like every now and then it jumps and misses a few lines and you might get a little lost if you're following along in the text. But it's got like David Tennant and Chiwetel Ejiofor and just a huge, wonderful cast that was really fun to listen to. And then I also watched the 1993 adaptation where Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson play Benedick and Beatrice. And seeing that, seeing the vibe, especially Emma Thompson delivering the lines, she's terrific. Doing the men ain't shit stuff is just. It's so, so much fun. So if you cannot get yourself to a production, there is a really good adaptation on film that you can watch. There are several, but I think the 1993 one is canonical.
- [27:43]
A
A so 90s cast. Like Denzel is Don Pedro and then Keanu Reeves is Don John because he has like four lines and you sort of be sullen and like, God level
- [27:53]
B
Denzel stuff though, he comes out and I was like, God, that's right. Denzel has been Sexy for like 50 years.
- [27:59]
A
He looks extremely good in the lighting and the whole garb and everything. Here you get Michael Keaton as Dogberry, even Robert Sean Lauderdale, Claudio and Keith Beckinsell is here. Like, it's a really good, good cast up and down the way. So first exposure. You mentioned yours already. Anything? Do you remember your first reading of it? Do you remember vibing with it from the very beginning?
- [28:15]
B
I remember liking it in high school. I think we read it right after Romeo and Juliet and that Romeo and Juliet was my first Shakespeare and so being kind of surprised about how much lighter this one feels and the banter between the characters moves quickly, but I feel like the language of Romeo and Juliet crackles more, like it's just faster and you need to access the just let Shakespeare wash over you vibe much more for Romeo and Juliet than you do for Much Ado About Nothing. It's a little easier to grasp. I just remember liking it and being a teenager who was very much the boys cannot hang. I think this is just true for most teenagers where you're in that developmental gap. But at the moment that I read it was like, I get it. Beatrice's goals. Maybe I'll be single in until I'm 35 and some man will be able to hang with me someday and that's how I'll know who it is.
- [29:12]
A
That's interesting.
- [29:15]
C
Today's episode is brought to you by W.W. norton Co. Incorporated, publishers of Son of Nobody by Jan Martel. The Soed is an ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd son, Sois of Medea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks and Troy. This commoner story was lost to time until Harlow Don, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly 30 centuries later. Son of Nobody is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live then, now, and always. Son of Nobody is Life of PI. Author Jan Martel's new novel, Life of PI was a commercial and literary success. The novel won the Booker Prize and was made into an Oscar winning film. In other words, you're going to want to get Jan Martel's latest Son of Nobody. Make sure to pick it up. And thanks again to W.W. norton Co. Incorporated for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by 11 reader. If you listen to audiobooks a lot, the narrator problem can be so real. 74% of audiobook listeners have stopped or considered stopping a book because of the narrator's voice. 11 reader helps by letting you choose from more than a thousand natural sounding voices for any title. You can even design your own narrator. So there are more than 50,000 audiobooks to choose from. There are bestsellers, hidden gems, and guilty pleasures. The catalog spans every genre, and you can pick the narrator that fits the story, and you can listen to anything. You can turn your documents, your PDFs, your eBooks into lifelike audiobooks. This gives you the freedom to upload any text and hear it read in studio quality voices. Your reading list becomes a listening list. There's premium listening at a fair price and plans start lower than audible with no credits to track or expire. And you can of course cancel anytime. So you get three days premium entirely free. Try before you commit. It's available on iOS, Android, Droid, and the web. Just go to bookriot.com 11reader Again, that's bookriot.com 11reader and thanks again to 11reader for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by underlined publisher of the Faraway Inn by Sarah Beth Durst. Now, if you're a fan of magical innkeeping and you love Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, or Practical Magic, lean in, this is for you. So when 16 year old Calissa arrives at her great aunt's BNB for the summer, she's shocked to find a rundown inn rather than the cozy bed and breakfast she was expecting. Grumpy and eccentric Auntie Z is determined to keep anyone from messing with her beloved inn, even though she very clearly needs the help to convince her great aunt to keep her around. Calissa sets to work fixing up the inn, enlisting extra help from the groundskeeper's son. But the longer she stays, the surer she is that there's something strange about the B and B and its guests. Something almost otherworldly. So once you pick up the Faraway End by Sarah Beth Durst, you are going to be swept up into a magical world of inkeeping and you're going to be in awe of the beautiful floral sprayed edges on the book. So it's pretty on the inside and the outside. Make sure to pick it up. And thanks again to Underlined for sponsoring this episode.
- [33:03]
A
Interesting. Yeah, I read it. I've read it a bunch of times. A high school reading, a college reading, grad school reading, but my transformative Much Ado experience. We went to Shakespeare in the park in 2004 for a production of Much Ado with Jimmy Smits and Kirsten Johnson, she of 3rd Rock from the Sun.
- [33:19]
B
So jealous it was, listen, Jimmy Smith's Forever.
- [33:25]
A
It was a magical, you know, New York. Beautiful. You know, you've been in New York in one of Those summer nights.
- [33:32]
B
Yeah.
- [33:32]
A
Have you ever done Shakespeare in the Park? Have you ever.
- [33:34]
B
I haven't. The timing is never lined up.
- [33:36]
A
It's a pain in the butt. It's a pain in the butt. It really is. Unless you know people who, you know, their company or whatever donate a bunch of tickets. For those of you who don't know Shakespeare in the park, it's in New York City. There's a theater in. In the middle of the park and tickets are, quote, unquote, free, meaning there's, you know, corporate sponsors get some, like if you're, you know, American Express or whatever. But then also most of them are available free, but you can't reserve a ticket. At least you couldn't 20 years ago. Maybe digital technology, they did something else now. And you would line up the day of starting as early as you can get there and you'd wait in line. And my memory is that the tickets were like noon or 1, and we would get there like 7 in the morning, 6 o'. Clock.
- [34:14]
B
Oh, my gosh, it's a whole day. Okay.
- [34:16]
A
And, you know, I'm 24. Michelle and I are 24. And we've got more money, we've got more time than money now. But then what you're doing is just hanging out in the park. We'd bring board games, we'd bring cards, you know, we'd bring our book. You know, we meet friends there and we bring our, like, bagels or whatever from Zabar's, you know, down the way and hang out in the park for a day and then go drink in the afternoon, then come back at night. I mean, peak, whatever. Peak, New York. Peak, peak. This kind of experience. And I was completely blown away by it. And I'd like the Beatrice and Benedict thing, but seeing them do that thing together was so fun and special. And the night and the music and the company and everything was just. It was terrific. And I learned shortly thereafter that Smits and Kirsten Johnson had been a production of Twelfth Night together just a couple years before. And they ran it back. So, like, they enjoyed it. So. And like, it was so much fun to see. And they were so mel. They were so well matched, both performatively and like, physically, like, you know, Kristen Johnson is tall.
- [35:16]
B
She's tall. Yeah.
- [35:18]
A
And they weren't sort of in their 60s as they are now. I guess their Smiths is probably in his early 70s, because it's been 20 years. But they were older, right? They were. They weren't 15. They weren't. They weren't Romeo and Juliet.
- [35:28]
B
They weren't 27 late season West Wing era. Jimmy Smith.
- [35:32]
A
Yeah.
- [35:33]
B
Which is.
- [35:33]
A
Yes. Yes.
- [35:34]
B
Chef's kiss. Perfect.
- [35:36]
A
And. And he. And he was terrific. So that's when my heart really went to Much Ado is to be my favorite of my. The Shakespeare comedies, but also to me, like the will they, won't they verbal sparring, word sex thing that I am always looking for in a. In a romantic comedy. Like this is it for me, Rebecca. I guess what I'm saying, like, I want some version of this forever or not version of them specifically. But I want the romantic will they, won't they people to be sparring and equals and feisty and getting into it and sharp and like the action is the juice, as they say in uncut gems. The. The dialogue is the juice for me when it comes to romcoms or romances in general. I want the people to be doing something with words and ideas, with each other that exists beyond the boy they've got. They really want to do it, and I understand that's a part of it for everyone. That's cool and I get it, and I'm one of those people too. But when it comes to fictive or literary representations of trying to figure out if this person is right for me, I want it principally to be about words and principally about interplay at that level. So I'm cooked for this forever, I guess, man.
- [36:42]
B
Yeah. I think you see Jimmy Smith and Kirsten Johnson together, and I think I would be like, I don't need to ever see another adaptation.
- [36:50]
A
This is it. Yeah. Yeah.
- [36:52]
B
You've already experienced the pinnacle. That's amazing and I'm very jealous.
- [36:57]
A
But what is it like to read this? What is this all about? We've done a lot of this so far, Rebecca, but where else to get into this?
- [37:02]
B
It works. It just works like it's a real. Love is a battlefield. Pat Benatar shouts to Pat.
- [37:09]
A
Yeah.
- [37:10]
B
Yeah. And the. I read the Folger Shakespeare Library edition that had a lot of notes about the intertwining of romantic love and warfare. So I think that's something worth keeping in mind. But, like, it just works. It's wild how far ahead of his time Shakespeare was like, I feel that way every time I read Shakespeare, but in this case, it's like he's really on the male fragility thing. All of the dudes don't want to get married because they're afraid of being cheated on. All of the jokes are about getting cucked, and they're in a society where the cost of infidelity is really much higher for women. So it's just these guys, egos on the line and Shakespeare's poking fun at them, they're poking fun at each other, but Beatrice really has the best time poking fun at them. And then there's also the, like, old fashioned component of. It's a little unbelievable how quickly these people all fall in love with each other. Like, really all it took was going, hey, he really likes you, or that Claudio and hero see each other, you know, across the room and then the match gets made. But that was kind of the way things were done back then. So you got to suspend a little disbelief. But that banter between Beatrice and Benedict goes a long way for helping me suspend disbelief about like, oh, actually they've had a vibe together for quite a while and both of them are insistent on maintaining their independence. And you, you understand why. Like, each of them is really sharp and they are somebody that would need a partner who could keep up with them, but that they finally come to see that actually that that thing exists inside the other one. It's. It is so much fun. I just had, I mean, I engaged with three different versions of this in the last four days. So, like, I was having a good time.
- [38:53]
A
Yeah, it's very, very straightforward in terms of plot. Like, you don't, you're not gonna have a hard time understanding what's going on or what people's motivations are. So it's so straightforward in terms of plot that Shakespeare can, like, dance around it a little bit with like, deceptions within deceptions and like multiple turnbacks. Like, you can follow in it and it doesn't matter. Right. In that particular God. Even the hero's fake death for the characters in the play, there's a lot at stake. But this is not like the fake death of Romeo and Juliet, which is going to have a lot of import and, like, things are going to go super sideways from there. You know, one thing you were talking about, and this is very much in the play about the, the anxiety that men have about women having extramarital or premarital affairs. You know, one thing the word sex does or the meeting of the minds does is like, you kind of can't cheat on somebody if you're perfectly matched that way, because they're not interchangeable. Where this idea of like, the physical act of sex as being kind of interchangeable. Right. Like, you can get your rocks off with a lot of different kind of people if you have like an intellectual meeting of the minds, you're not sort of like universal docking stations or dockers for other kinds of. Of people. So like, there's a way in which you cannot. This kind of pairing is more, I don't know, protected because it's gated by a more specific meeting of the minds or a matching of wits.
- [40:13]
B
That's a great point. I really like that.
- [40:16]
A
Let's see. Beatrice and Benedict are the main attraction they've been for the beginning. I find myself anxious them to return when they are off stage, like some other people get some stuff to do. But I would be lying if my mind, my eyes don't sort of jump ahead to say, okay, now how long do I have to wait for Beatrice and how much of this do I not to have to care about until they're back on the page? This is the marriage of equals, like I said, has precursor, precursors. But this one takes it to the extreme, to the point where I feel like they're almost the versions of the same person, just gender flipped version of each other. Even the names, of course, are right there. Where were you to switch lines? And of course the gender stuff, it would be difficult to notice, like their personalities are so matched that they're almost interchangeable. And it feels to me a little bit like, like in every chess movie you have to get a sign that someone's a genius or the, the best person they have to play as themselves. I feel myself Shakespeare writing himself into this. Like, I'm going to play both sides of the board on this and see how much fun I can have at the same time.
- [41:15]
B
Yeah, it's really in that ongoing perpetual debate about like, should you marry someone who's a lot like you or should you marry your opposite? Is it opposites attract or is it that you're looking for someone who's very similar? And for Benedict and Beatrice, it's certainly they need at least someone who's an intellectual equal to them. And it comes across as a very similar, like a sharp, pokey vibe. Spiky.
- [41:41]
A
It's like one my one reason my brothers and I got so good at ping pong is that I was older. Wes was the natural best in the middle, and then Kyle was the youngest. So he was always playing against us. Right. So in various permutations, we were always playing against someone that was a little better than us or at least older. And in this mark, we're somehow Shakespeare pulls off where both Benedict is smarter than Beatrice and Beatrice is smarter than Benedict. I don't know how he did that, but it's. It's tremendous. At the same time. Yeah. Idea of knowing something intimately through language. They know each other so well because of a long history of talking. Right. Claudian hero is much of an older style of matchmaking. Young prince, innocent maiden. They know each other not at all, so are especially prone to misunderstanding and attuned to deceit. And that also brings up situation versus character. The Claudio hero, like, this is their situation. They marry out of station and positionality, where Beatrice and Benedict are really more of an exploration of character, finding each other in the plot. Like the plot exists so that the characters can figure each other out as characters and as people, rather than sort of a mousetrap version of an actual logic of, you know, Oedipus Rex or something else like that. At the same time time, Beatrice and Benedict snap out of their entrance positions when hearing themselves and notably their faults described by others.
- [42:55]
B
Yes.
- [42:56]
A
And the important thing is that those observations are both accurate and believed. It is key that they are both smart and self aware enough to hear real criticism themselves and take it to heart. That can be hard to see in this play, but it's important.
- [43:11]
B
Yeah. That there. I noted that as well, that each of them overhears people talking about them and they have a moment of like, am I really like that?
- [43:19]
A
Yes. And. And being like, oh, yeah, I totally am.
- [43:22]
B
Yeah. And then being like, oh yeah, the. The barb hits deep because, yeah, it turns out I am like that. And maybe, like, maybe on the other side of that, if I could get over it, is love and connection with this great mind. Sex with a great guy. What more are we looking for? But I. I really appreciated that Shakespeare does that as well. Like, you know, we've bumped up against a couple dialogues in some of the books that we've covered. Most notably between Joe and Laurie in Little Women where he's like, we've got to have it out. I've just got to tell you straight how you are. But this thing of overhearing other people talking about you is also a way to get there. And it's not pleasant and it's really like pretty subtle in the text. But I noted that as well, that each of them is like, oh, okay, never mind. Like, the people around me all seem to agree that I'm the asshole here. So let's figure it out.
- [44:12]
A
Yeah. You have a note here about nothing and noting. Can you do that real quick? I think that people don't know that. You might want to. We might want to.
- [44:17]
B
Yeah, it does. It just helps to know that nothing was pronounced as noting when the play was written. So there's wordplay even in the title of this. That much, in fact is made of notes and of things that are noted throughout the play. And there are many lines about. Did you note. She noted. I noted. We are noting. And it. It just helps. Helps to know that nothing and noting can be interchangeable. Aren't always, but can be in a lot of the parts of the text.
- [44:44]
A
I don't remember where I got this, and I've had this in my mind for a long time. And if you want to go research yourself, go for it. I remember there's also usually a quadruple entendre with Shakespeare that's more body. And the one I remember is that nothing and no thing were sometimes descriptors of women's because they literally don't have a thing. So there's another valence that you can go try. I'm not sure I remember that. That obviously would have stuck with me as a high school reader. So that could have been something my high school English teacher invented. I don't know. I couldn't find any that didn't make
- [45:16]
B
it into Folger edition.
- [45:17]
A
Yeah, I didn't make it in the Folger edition, nor to my Riverside Shakespeare at the same time. All right, straight thoughts, Rebecca. What else do you have? What. What occurred to you as reading this that aren't sort of germane. They're side dishes, not entrees to the reading experience.
- [45:29]
B
Really questionable security procedures happening here where they're just hiring randos off the street to patrol the prince's castle. Like, I was tempted to Google. Is this how they used to do it back in the day? But like, Dogberry is just walking around town being like, who's not too drunk and available tonight?
- [45:48]
A
Did you like the Dogberry stuff? What'd you make of that?
- [45:51]
B
I like it better in the performances of it. I liked it better in the play than or in, you know, in the movie than just in the text. I think it's. It. It's harder to get the sort of silliness of it in just the text for readers today.
- [46:04]
A
I agree with you.
- [46:05]
B
Yeah. I believe the commentators that it came across back then. But this has always been performed, so it probably really depends on who's in that role. But I liked it much better when Michael Keaton was doing it.
- [46:16]
A
The full character in All Shakespeare. I always prefer performed the monologues and soliloquies. Always prefer to read or the language stuff. But that especially because it tends. Comedy tends to be a Lot broader in that regard and also more topical. Like, they're making a lot of references to things that you and I have no way of understanding without a concordance and deep research. There's there at the same time, one of mine is, even 500 years ago, we were bending over backwards to come up with novel romantic plots. So many mass and overhearing and like, already we're trying to jump through a bunch of hoops and we've done five. We've had 500 years more of spinning out things. Like, no wonder it's hard to have a believable romantic comedy, because it's kind of all been done at some point.
- [46:54]
B
I think that's a really great point. And it, like, sort of connects with one of my frustrations as a modern reader of rom coms. Like, we're in a golden age of rom com books being written. There are more of them, like, all over the place. They're really popular. But I. The banter needs to be good. It really needs to be good and believable. And I'm gonna give you 10 pages. And if the banter does not sound like real smart people engaging with each other, if it sounds like what someone thinks real smart people sound like, I'm gonna be out. And Shakespeare sets the bar for that here.
- [47:28]
A
Yeah. In order to write it, you have to be it that you have to write. You have to be able to do smart, funny, awesome banter to write it. And that's. Not everyone can do that. Right. I mean, that's one where the. The person and the. The task really need to be aligned at the same time.
- [47:43]
B
And like, in reality, so much of it is individual chemistry. Like, you can be. You can have a really smart person and drop them into a conversation with someone else who's really smart. But if. If the chemistry doesn't exist for them to have banter with each other, if it's not the right, like on the same wavelength length kind of thing, it doesn't work. And I think there are a lot of really smart writers who just. The romcom mode is not the right mode for them. But there's a lot of incentive to be writing romcoms today. And going back to this one and the origin of so much of the banter, like, it's really. It's Shakespeare and Nora Ephron and that's it. Like, in my heart.
- [48:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It made me. Have you ever, you know, like, I. I would be amenable to some version of like Waiting for Godot or My Dinner with Andre One of these, just two people on a bench talking to. I mean, dinner with Andres, a table. But like has. I'm sure someone has tried that, but like one long first date. I mean, I guess that's kind of what Before Sunrise is.
- [48:43]
B
Yeah, that's before something like this.
- [48:45]
A
But okay, so I wear the sparring version. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. We're on the same. We're on the same.
- [48:49]
B
It's Shakespeare. Nora Ephron and Richard link later.
- [48:52]
A
Yeah. So this is gonna bring up other instances where words are the primary avenue of courtship Before Sunrise. You know, Cyrano de Berzenek into Roxanne. Roxanne starring Steve Martin is one of the, you know, great 80s joys. Then also another Efron, which Sleepless in Seattle. It's not just that it's Efron, but think of the mode of courtship. Right. It's Meg Ryan over, not overhearing, but listening to Hanks give us essentially a soliloquy about what love means to him.
- [49:16]
B
Yeah.
- [49:16]
A
And then she writes a letter that weirdly speaks to an 8 year old boy's heart. And we're not gonna talk about that too much about the problems of that.
- [49:22]
C
That.
- [49:22]
A
But. And then they also see each other. But when they see each other, they're struck and they literally can't say anything. So it's both physical and intellectual at the same time.
- [49:31]
B
I just watched Sleepless in Seattle on a plane two weeks ago. And like, other than the fact that we talk about boundaries really differently today than we did in the 80s, it really holds up because it is this idea of being connected to someone through ideas. And then there's also, of course you've got. Where they literally fall in love with each other through their words, through their emails and messages and then again when they meet in person. But really the pinnacle.
- [49:55]
A
Yeah. 1 thought I had here. I really like that they have a lot of history by the time we pick up the plot, like we're in media res of their relationship. In media res, if you don't know that term, is like a way of just dropping you into the middle of the action rather than like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna get ready and here's this person you're meeting for the first time. This is not. We do not meet Beatrice and Benedict when they're like 14 and like at school together or whatever the version of this would be. They've got a lot of backstory and we feel it right away. And that also made me think of Ephron. In where In Harry Met Sally, she tries to do that. Right. We. The first 30 minutes are her showing us the earlier battles in the merry war between Harry and Sally where Shakespeare's just like, you have to believe it. And because the banter is so natural and their mode of communication and courtship. If that works, then you kind of believe that they've had it for a long time at the beginning, too. Let's see. Do Beatrice and Benedict change or are they revealed or some other verb? Is it scary to think that your whole understanding of yourself is fixed in this case they're going to be bachelor. Bachelor forever. Or that if you were but to hear the right few sentences, your total understanding of yourself and the world can be undone.
- [51:05]
B
I think that it's. The answer is yes to both.
- [51:08]
A
Yeah, that's a cheater. Right answer. But you're right. Yeah, I agree with you.
- [51:12]
B
Like, that's the paper that I would write in if the prompt. Or are they revealed or do they change as both. Like they are revealed to themselves and then they change to connect with each other. That. And I think it's Shakespeare taking us into that question of is this what's scarier to find out that you might be the same forever or that this fixed idea of yourself is actually wrong and could be changed if you get the right piece of feedback. And it's. But for that right insight from the right person or from the right people that your whole world might be different.
- [51:52]
A
Another straight thought I had is, you know, in Shakespeare and there's a lot of, like, other kinds of comedies that are outside of Shakespeare that include Mass and Mistaken Identity. Did this ever once happen in real life? Oh, like anything with a mask and a marriage plot. Like, did any. I'm. For those of you who've read, like, Italian, I don't know, like, I don't even know that they exist, but like biographies of minor lords and ladies in Italy in, like 17th century, was there a lot of people accidentally falling with the wrong person because they were wearing a mask at a ball? Also, if this happens so often, I would just outlaw masquerade balls. There's too much misunderstanding about who's who.
- [52:27]
B
I need to believe that we've always been smarter than. Who's that guy who just happens to have a thing over his eyes right now?
- [52:34]
A
Yeah, the Italian. The Renaissance version is mask fishing rather than catfish fishing.
- [52:40]
B
Yes.
- [52:42]
A
Is it more fun, interesting to imagine Beatrice and Benedict actually hating each other at the beginning or as I always read it as pigtails in the inkwell, but with Words, flirtation.
- [52:49]
B
I think them hating each other at the beginning would make it too. It's like, too easy of a story. Like, that's the more like traditional enemies to lovers. And then, like, something like lightning's gonna strike. And now they love each other. And I kind of never really believe, though I prefer this version where they have a deep history. There is some affection that's under the surface, whether either of them can acknowledge it or not. And it just has to be tapped into. I think that's more fun.
- [53:15]
A
Yeah, I'm tipping my hand a little bit, too. I don't believe in my heart of hearts that there's any version of when we first knew each other. We literally hated each other and then fell in love. I just don't believe that. I think if you're eventually going to be in a position where you like somebody, the seeds of it were there from the beginning. And maybe that hatred is sort of. Of transferred desire or whatever, repressed sexual. Sexual tension. But I've never heard of a version where, like, yeah, 10 years ago, we met each other and we hated each other. Like, literally couldn't stand each other. I thought they were like. I've never heard of that actually happening in real life. But anyway. Quote time, Rebecca. You know, it's weird. I don't have a full list because it kind of flies by. So, yeah, it's. I have a little less than. Than later than some other episodes.
- [53:58]
B
Mean early on. Leonato says, how much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping? Just a good one. Benedict complimenting Beatrice. I would my horse had the speed of your tongue. He sees it, you know.
- [54:12]
A
Oh, yeah. He gets it.
- [54:13]
B
And then Leonato says to Beatrice, thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue. And I was like, man, who among us has not heard be nicer.
- [54:23]
A
You should smile more. Leonardo's version, the Shakespeare version of you should smile more.
- [54:27]
B
Yeah. And then here's Benedict inventing radical candor. Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.
- [54:34]
A
Great poll. That's what I was saying before. Like, he heard it, and he's like, okay, I'll take that to heart. Yeah.
- [54:40]
B
Yeah. What do you have?
- [54:42]
A
I have. For which of my bad parts does thou first fall in love with me? Right. Like when they sort of starting to circle each other. This is always a fun part of when you. This is. I've done this once, so I should say this is a fun part of being in love. With someone is like. Like, then you get to needle the other person for, like, what did you like about me best? And all that kind of stuff. But because the pantomime, or at least their shared understandings they didn't like each other is like, now you've got to really eat the crow because you are saying all this crap about me. And you have to say which of the parts first fell away. The scales from your eyes fell away. I love the Mary war. I mean, I use this forever to think about this kind of dynamic between. And we should say we've mentioned all heterosexual couples at this point. I think it works for all pairings of all genders and sexualities where it's a verbal language, intellectual merry war between people.
- [55:31]
B
There are gender bent, like, gender bent adaptations and retellings of Much Ado About Nothing. Like, there are Goodreads lists of retellings. But you can find this, like, one of the joys of this story is that it is portable to people of any gender in any time, as Shakespeare can be adapted into, you know, sort of any time and setting. But you can find those. And that same vibe carries that over regardless.
- [55:55]
A
This is Beatrice saying. She's asked, like, are you ever gonna get married? Essentially by one of Leonardo, one of the other clods over there. Not till God make men of some other metal than earth would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust to make of her account, make account of her life to a clot of wayward moral saying, there's no one that I really want to hitch my wagon to because it's all garbage, let's say. You know, this is interesting. This is, I believe, Leonardo as well to certain. So the prince woos for himself. Friendship is constant. All other things, save in the office and affairs of love. So heart and business friendship works. But when you get love involved and business involved, friendship, the strange can be shown. I may or may not be in the middle of a watch of a Sopranos, where this is certainly true.
- [56:48]
B
Much Ado About Nothing in the Sopranos don't have a lot in common on the surface, but you just did it. Okay.
- [56:52]
A
Yeah, there you go. Let's see. Don John, who's just sort of like replacement level bad guy. Like, he's just a. Yeah, I guess if you're known as John the Bastard. I don't know how nice we're expected you to be, really, when you put it that way.
- [57:07]
B
He's gotten the shaft his whole life because he, like, is an illegitimate Child with somebody, he's come by it honestly.
- [57:14]
A
Also, like Shakespeare even shows that we don't care about John because he just gives him John. Everyone's Leonardo, Claudio, hero, Beatrice and John the bastard Dogberry. And John Dogberry. But he does get this little bit that I like. All hearts and love use their own tongues. Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent. For beauty is a witch against whom's charms faith melteth into blood. So, like this. I don't use beauty as your lodestar. Here, here. Right. Negotiate for yourself what you're interested in, because beauty is a witch. It's changeable. It's. It's alterable. Like there's a lot of different kinds of people that are beautiful and it goes away at the same time. Benedict. This is just my favorite Benedict. I don't know of anything else to say, but I wanted to get some language into the pod. Shall quips and sentences these paper bullets of the brain awe a man for the career of his humor? Basically saying, will these words change what I've always done and who I've been? The career of my human. I've always been this way. No. The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I live till I were married. The world must be peopled is the point of comedy. This goes back to Aristotle and, you know, the early days of tragedy and comedy. Tragedy being the certainty of death. That's what tragedy is about. And comedy is essentially about the world. World being people. The continuity of life is another way of understanding that those are the two. Those are the two sides of this human coin. I myself is going to die. I. Every one of us is going to die. Yet life goes on. How do you reconcile those two things? And the answer is art. That's for me. Is this for you, Rebecca? Why might this be for you?
- [58:52]
B
I think if you want to go back to the origins of the rom com, like it's. It is really fun, especially through seeing it or listening to it, to engage with this banter and see what a high level execution of this kind of verbal sparring looks like. Also, if you're just looking for an accessible place to go do some Shakespeare, this is much more accessible than some of the tragedies. It's way more accessible than Hamlet. I'm glad that we started with Hamlet. We had a great time in that episode. But. But for like, it's been a while since you read Shakespeare. Maybe you've never read Shakespeare or like, you just sort of did The Cliffs Notes in high school. And you want to actually engage with it yourself. This is a great place to start.
- [59:34]
A
Yeah. I mean, if you can go fire up the 1993 version, I think you're having a pretty good time. I don't have a lot of maybe nots. We have nothing here.
- [59:42]
B
I don't either. I think it's just if you just don't care about Shakespeare, which you're allowed to, but we are both on the record of, like, if you have decided you just don't care about Shakespeare, I don't really know how to. To talk to you about. About art and literature. But there's otherwise. I mean, it'll. It's like two hours out of your life. It's worth a try.
- [60:00]
A
Very quick, very quick. I also. This one was a little more difficult because we do not, in our immortal questions that are asked, have one about love and relationships. We have, what is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? I mean, I guess your romantic life is a subset of what is the good life. Rebecca. Yeah.
- [60:23]
B
Yes. And Benedict and Beatrice, especially Beatrice, in my reading of it, have had like certain visions of what their lives were going to be. And those are called into question here and they reassess what they actually want. So I think it's very much what is the good life. And maybe a subset of free will, real or no, is do people change? Can people change?
- [60:42]
A
Right.
- [60:43]
B
And they're both wrestling with the.
- [60:44]
C
That.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah. I think also there is a little subset, maybe in a more interpersonal way. How do I know what I know? That's about like, how do you even understand yourself? Because you are only seeing yourself through the prism of yourself. Right. So we get these particular moments. Cupid's traps, rather than arrows caught Beatrice and Benedict in this one, but the trap was a mirror. Right. Because the things that were said about them weren't untrue. They weren't lying.
- [61:09]
B
Right.
- [61:10]
A
They were saying a true thing indirectly, but they were saying a true thing at the same time. So, like, how do you get enough self knowledge where you can do something with it? And this is education. I think the classical liberal education is you're gonna learn enough to be able to see yourself in your position in a way that you can do something about it if you want to.
- [61:29]
B
Yeah. And there's a little also what's the deal with good and evil insofar as Don John the Bastard is plotting to keep Claudio and Hero away from each other. And the. The side characters even say to each other, like, don't mind him. He's all. He's just been mad forever because he's an illegitimate kid and he's been treated like shit. And like there's some explaining to each other about why this person is doing evil things or bad things. I'm not sure that this disrupt the marriage plot cracks up to be evil, but there's a little exploration of why would somebody maybe do some.
- [62:04]
A
Something unsavory, you know, I've never thought about it until just this moment when you said that if you think of John the Bastard as being symbolic of something, right. He is the product of outside of wedlock sexual desire. Right. So the play is sort of showing us, like, here's one of the reasons you don't want to be held captive by lust is because you can produce this thing that's going to come back, bite you back in the ass. Right? Like, the reason he's. He's not treated well is because he falls outside of the. I'm sure the patronage or whatever's going on. At the same time, he's pissed off because he's illegitimate. And this idea of illegitimacy itself is a problem.
- [62:44]
B
That's it. That's. That's what I read it as that Shakespeare is more pointing to, like, these people have created this problem in Don Jon by treating him so poorly. And if they had just been nice to him or treated him like everybody else, we wouldn't be in this situation. Is sort of what's underneath that.
- [63:02]
A
Are we sure this is about art and writing?
- [63:06]
B
I mean, it's really about the power of language. But Shakespeare is always about the power of art.
- [63:12]
A
Yeah.
- [63:13]
B
And language is, you know, a form of art. But what Benedick and Beatrice are doing with each other here is absolutely about language.
- [63:19]
A
Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal Adaptation?
- [63:22]
B
Absolutely, yes. And we are treating the 1993 Kenneth Branagh Emma Thompson joint as the Signal adaptation. There. There are many of them. There's a later one that Joss Whedon produced that like Joss Whedon is problematic for a lot of reasons. But I've. I read good reviews of that production. But 93 is the way to go. I think.
- [63:41]
A
I think we'd even take the Signal Adaptation. Could you. Out of a decent adaptation, like, I think a good high school production, you could have A hell of a time.
- [63:47]
B
Yeah. You could have a good time at just about any version of this, I think.
- [63:51]
A
If you wanted to see a movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets, what would you choose?
- [63:55]
B
Okay. I originally have in my notes here that I would love to see this as an and Juliet style jukebox musical. I think that would be really fun. But the more I've thought about it, the more that I want a version of this that does what the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet does. Like. Like, I did miss edge and crackle when I was, like, watching the 1993 one.
- [64:15]
A
Someone who's addicted to laudanum to show
- [64:17]
B
up in the 93 one is just very true. It's a period piece, like, true to the original. But I think Shakespeare is fun in an update or, like, a teen comedy. It really, like, I'm retrospectively disappointed that there's not a, like, 1999 teen comedy inspired by this one. In the way that, like, 10 things I hate about you is the Taming of the Shrew. And you know that Clueless is Emma.
- [64:42]
A
Well, Taming of the Shoe has a little bit of that Beatrice and Benedick dynamic in the main characters. Just more plot about why they can't be together. And yeah, again, it's a little more. There's a little more fried between the two of them at the same time. I was thinking about this in this regard where we get, like. We'll get modern versions of Hamlet all the time. Like, I think there's a Riz Ahmed right now one playing in theaters. But we'd never get a modern version of a comedy. But with Shakespeare's language, what we'll get is an adaptation. We'll get like a Clueless or something. But we never get. Is, like, the actual language set.
- [65:13]
B
Yes.
- [65:14]
A
In 1985 high school or something like the.
- [65:17]
B
The film from 2023. Anyone but you was G.L. powell and Sydney Sweeney. That is a retelling of Much Ado About Nothing. Their names are Ben and B. But it's. It's just the loose elements of the.
- [65:29]
A
But they don't. They can't do the Shakespeare thing because they're not Shakespeare.
- [65:32]
B
Right. And it's not the Shakespeare language. Yeah.
- [65:35]
A
Yeah. So I. I think what I would take. I'm on this. I think I'm agreeing with you. I would like to see a movie version of it, but change the setting around to, I don't know, 1954. Like. Like a dead poet society, like a women's college and a men's college or something like I don't know. But like use. Just use the language but bring it somewhere else. I don't. I agree with you. I don't like the maybe I've seen too many of the were vaguely English lords with sword stuff. Like I've seen too much of that.
- [66:05]
B
Yeah. I mean you can keep denzel from the 93 adaptation, but everything else I want updated.
- [66:11]
A
Yeah. Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes and more. You did the Glen Palace. I did not know this. I have not seen this and I did not know this.
- [66:18]
B
This is. I mean watch it if you're hard up for airplane movie material is my take on anyone but you.
- [66:25]
A
I think if I am doing a modern version of this where and and you're taking my thread that the most important piece is intellectual and language courtship. I am not casting Glenn Powell and Steven Sweeney as the main character.
- [66:39]
B
Huh. Yeah. Maybe get in the time machine and cast Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Or why not? They could do it now.
- [66:49]
A
Yeah.
- [66:49]
B
We just got done saying Benedick and Beatrice don't really have an age cap.
- [66:54]
A
How about. Yeah, that we could do a recap. Maybe we'll save that for our office hours. Let's. Let's. Let's make that our office hours. We're casting our ideal version of a version right now. We can think about it together. Other you have a great Stay weird Goodread so this is I knew I like this new bit we're doing which are looking at the most popular Goodreads quote the most.
- [67:12]
B
I first I tried to guess what when I was looking this up what was going to be the most popular quote from this on Goodreads. And I've been right for a couple of the books we've done. I would never in a million years have gotten this one. It's a quote from Balthazar's song that starts Sigh no more ladies sigh no more men were deceivers ever. And it's like the whole song is the most popular quote. I have to believe it's because of the Sinomore ladies men were deceivers ever bit. And then number two is what I would have guessed, which is I can see he's not in your good books, said the messenger to Beatrice. No. And if he were, I would burn my library. But you can usually count on Goodreads to pick a quote about books and make it the number one quote.
- [67:55]
A
Yeah, I think I wonder if the Signomore is the most popular because of that Mumford and songs songs really popular song Called sidenote.
- [68:03]
B
I thought about that too. I would believe. Yeah, I will believe just about anything when it comes to like the conspiracies around how quotes become popular on Goodreads, which maybe we're the only people who have conspiracies about those things.
- [68:14]
A
You have an awesome note that if you hadn't put it in, I was gonna put in this too about the prose poetry.
- [68:19]
B
Oh yeah. I found this deep in my research. But Much Ado About Nothing contains more prose than any other Shakespeare play. It's only about 25% in verse. I think that's probably why it feels so much easier and more accessible. Shakespeare's doing less of. Like in Hamlet, for instance, there's a lot of putting. Picking a certain word just because it fits the cadence or putting words in a counterintuitive order because it fits the iamic pentameter. And since so little of Much Ado About Nothing is in verse, it's a more direct read through.
- [68:50]
A
I wonder if contemporaneous experiencers of the play would have noted that as making it feel more conversational. Making for more quote unquote, realistic, like almost like Robert Altman's characters talking over each other was a sign of trying to imbue the. The work with realism. I was trying to. I was trying to make a case for why this might be because you would think if the primary attraction here is the wordplay between Beatrice and Benedict, my suspicion or instinct would have been to flower it up, to really posify it. But he went the other way, which I guess that's why he's Shakespeare and I'm not, among many, many other reasons. But that's one. Yeah, I have here that King Charles in his personal copy scratched out the title Much Ado About Nothing and just wrote Beatrice and Benedict. And I say I stand with King Charles, I stand with the monarchy on that particular reading of this one.
- [69:42]
B
Yeah, really telling like that. And in most of like, if you just surf around online looking for people chatting about Beatrice and Benedict or you know, reviews, light commentary, like not the scholarly stuff. The thing that readers and people going to see the play like is Beatrice and Benedict. The Claudio hero stuff opens the play and gets more screen time or more stage time, they get a lot more language devoted to them and all of the scheming and stuff around them, but it really is about Beatrice and Benedick.
- [70:10]
A
Hot takes Rebecca. Where do you want to go?
- [70:12]
B
If you have to slut shame, you should at least do it with language. Like she knows the heat of a luxurious Bed.
- [70:18]
A
That is next level tier. God. Tier one liners. Yeah. You have another good. I mean.
- [70:27]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean.
- [70:28]
A
I mean, Efron's not Shakespeare, but she's doing more of the things we like. Right.
- [70:32]
B
Yeah. I just think that if you want to write a rom com, you should be required to read or see Much Ado About Nothing and then see some Nora Ephron before you are allowed to try to write the banter. Like just know. Know what the highest level of that looks like so you know what to strive for.
- [70:48]
A
I agree. I already said the seeing. Seeing it performed as superior. The mass, the dancing, the where are they, who's saying what in front of whom, the overhearing, all that plays better when you see human bodies doing it. I've got another hot take in my continued effort to. To tell people about courtship, which I had very little to do and it's been 30 years since it's happened. I think being around, being someone that other people enjoy being around is an underrated courtship ritual. And just like that you're fun, that you're a good, interesting, that you care about other people, that you're, you know, have something interesting to say. Now again, I don't think slagging the other people all the time and because you're so much smarter them is going to work. I think people think that's what the message to take. I think being fun and interesting sort of in a general way around other people is a good way. Way to find other people. So there you go.
- [71:38]
B
Yeah, it's not real negging like this is. Yeah, this is like playful, appreciative. Yeah, yeah.
- [71:46]
A
So that's my other hot take. Further reading for books. Other things that are like this.
- [71:51]
B
I mean there's so much inspired by this. Pride and Prejudice is the most obvious classic that's inspired by the banter. And then there are lists on Goodreads. As I've said, like you can google yourself a retelling or really any contemporary rom com has some roots here.
- [72:09]
A
Yeah, I'm going different medium. This is an unknown movie, death set starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who themselves have a complicated romantic history. So that's imbues it. Also weirdly written by Nora Ephron's parents who were also screenwriters at the same time. Yeah, yeah. They were extremely heavy drinkers and it was problematic and there's a whole story to be told there. Oh, this is a great idea for someone to take. Take a movie based on Nora Efron's childhood in her career could we get someone playing Nora Ephron in her like a biopic of Nora Ephron. Don't you think that would work, Rebecca?
- [72:44]
B
I nominate Michelle Williams. They look nothing alike, but I feel like she would be great.
- [72:50]
A
We'll take that to office hours. Anyway, the setup here is. It's also germane to like technological anxieties as one might have.
- [72:56]
B
Oh yeah.
- [72:57]
A
Katherine Hepburn plays a. A corporate librarian. Reference librarian essentially where different pieces of this NBC like company will call in for fact checking. And she's super smart and gets a bunch of wonderful lines. And they're both older. That was another thing that I was thinking about. They're both, I think that they're in their 60s by this point, maybe a little bit older. Tracy is quite old at this point. And Spencer Tracy is a computer engineer who's been hired by the company to come in and put in a. A basically AI system to help answer the questions. And they of course have a reason to be suspicious of each other. But they are. They are well matched pair and their lines together in Theordemic are just super fun. At one point someone, someone comes into the office and sort of is. Begins to try to spar with Katherine Hepburn. And Tracy says to them, careful, you're in the big leagues. And that's I think, I think it's a good indication of what's going on. And it's also a great Christmas movie. There's a lot of Christmas stuff going on. We watch it every day around Christmas time. So there you go too.
- [74:02]
B
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- [74:26]
A
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- [74:52]
B
Nice choice hitting up this podcast.
- [74:54]
A
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- [75:08]
B
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A
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B
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- [75:12]
A
Hard seltzer with flavors, 8% alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works Chicago, Illinois cocktail party crib sheet. This is a thinner index card than we normally have. The only thing I have here, all the cool kids have Beatrice and Bennett as their favorite hetero rom com duo. They just do. Just mark it up. Anything else?
- [75:31]
B
All right, now let's get into our final well read score here.
- [75:35]
A
Zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. One is historical importance. Two is readability. Three, current relevance of central questions. Four, book nerd read cred. And five. Oh, damn factor. Kind of an odd one to fit onto this Rebecca, is it not?
- [75:49]
B
It is. I mean historical importance less. Less important than other Shakespeares. But Shakespeare is more important than almost anyone else. So eight.
- [76:01]
A
Well, yeah, I was thinking something similar. I guess it. I guess it's. It goes down to Shakespeare. Plus, how important do we think this dynamic of representing romantic love is? Which maybe is really important.
- [76:14]
B
Maybe it is really important. Yeah, it's somewhere in the eight. Nine. It doesn't hit a ten for me.
- [76:19]
A
Can't be ten. Can't be ten. Yeah, but eight and a half. Nine.
- [76:23]
B
Eight and a half. Yeah, let's go.
- [76:24]
A
I like that readability. It's the one of the more readable Shakespeare's. But Shakespeare is tough. Another one where we have to like take two versions of the score.
- [76:32]
B
I think I would go like a six or a seven. It's. The language isn't super. It's not dense. There aren't a ton of outdated references like you. You know the Folger edition that I read has the side by side pages where.
- [76:47]
A
Right.
- [76:47]
B
You know, you get all of the contemporary English translations of things and most of those are like, it's. You can still understand the vibe of the sentence without picking up the. The specific meaning which I think means something like Hamlet is a lot harder. Yeah.
- [77:02]
A
There are sentence in hand with like. I literally know what the point of this sentence is.
- [77:05]
B
Right? Yeah, maybe like a six, I don't know Shakespeare curve.
- [77:09]
A
Because anything we say, there's a concordance. You're like, maybe that's a two.
- [77:13]
B
That's what I was just about to say. Like. But then again, maybe it's a three. I don't know. Do you just split the difference and call it a five?
- [77:19]
A
Yeah, I think, I think that's all I can do with Shakespeare. I can't. I cannot bring myself to make it lower than that because of the pleasure of it. Yeah, right. Like it takes. You gotta, you gotta get out your knife and fork. But the bites are good. If you, if you can get it. If you can get it served up right. Current relevance of central questions. I mean, romantic love is always around and yet it's not sort of pressing. I don't know. 7, 6, 5.
- [77:43]
B
Doesn't feel super urgent, I think. 6.
- [77:45]
A
Let's go with 6.
- [77:46]
C
6, yeah.
- [77:47]
A
Book nerd recreate. Interesting one. So many of these we have this. If you've gone around to read it on your own to see what the deal is, you get extra points. If you resigned it, you get zero points. So where does that leave us?
- [78:04]
B
And it's less important, as we were saying, like, because it's less important than some of the other Shakespeare's and it
- [78:09]
A
literally calls itself Much Ado About Nothing. So
- [78:15]
B
I don't know. Four.
- [78:17]
A
Sure, sure.
- [78:19]
B
Okay, okay, hold on.
- [78:21]
A
I want to back up. Okay. I think any Shakespeare has to be at least six.
- [78:24]
B
Okay.
- [78:25]
A
You read Shakespeare on your own, has
- [78:27]
B
to be at least six. Okay, we'll give it a six. Yeah.
- [78:29]
A
Oh damn factor. Now this is one where what we're looking for here is at its peak, the peak moments of this text. How much? You go, oh yeah, that's the right there. By that measure, I'm looking at an eight and a half.
- [78:44]
B
I think that's right, right? Yeah.
- [78:46]
A
When they're really going at it and you're having the most fun.
- [78:48]
B
The highs are high.
- [78:49]
A
The highs are very high for that. I feel good about this. So 8 and a half for historical importance, 5 for readability, 6 for current relevance of central questions, 6 for book nerd read cred. And 8 and a half for oh damn factor. There we go. What a joy to have a fun one. An easy one.
- [79:05]
B
Yeah.
- [79:06]
A
At the same time, that's our show. For detailed show notes, you go to patreon.com 02 well read. You can also sign up for our free newsletter and other membership options, which includes early ad free episodes of this kind of episode. But also one of the choices will allow you to stick around and listen to office hours in which we metaphorically pour ourself a dark liquor in a tumbler and sit in a leather chair around a fire and just sort of shoot the. Shoot the shit about what else we were thinking and noticed this one. It looks like we're going to recast a modern adaptation for ourselves. I'm looking very much forward to that. You can shoot us an email@zero to well read bookriot.com recommendations, corrections, appreciations. Maybe you'll get a mailbag, maybe you won't. Into the Future Follow us on all the socials@zero to well read podcast.com thanks so much to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. And Zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network, Rebecca. We will continue our merry war with episodes into the future. Thank you so much.
- [80:08]
B
Always a pleasure.