Volume 40, Number 10 · May 27, 1993
Shakespeare in the Sun
By Anne Barton
Much Ado About Nothing
a film by Kenneth Branagh
Much Ado About Nothing the Movie by
by William Shakespeare, Screenplay, Introduction, and Notes on the Making of Kenneth Branagh, photographs by Clive Coote
Norton, 131 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598) is one of the most resolutely urban of Shakespeare's comedies. The house of Leonato, Governor of Messina, stands in a Sicilian city of churches, law courts, and jails, where crowded streets as well as private dwellings need to be patrolled and kept quiet at night—however inefficiently—by Constable Dogberry and his shambling subordinates. Although Leonato's town house, like that of his brother Antonio, is grand enough to boast a spacious garden, in which some of the action takes place, no one in this play ever escapes to the equivalent of As You Like It's Forest of Arden, the wood near Athens of A Midsummer Night's Dream, or even Petruchio's country estate in The Taming of the Shrew. Outside the tightly knit family world of Leonato's Messina, but never visited in the play, there seem to be only that unidentified battlefield on which Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon, has just defeated his bastard brother, the vicious and disaffected Don John, and those Italian cities in which Leonato's other aristocratic guests were born: Florence in the case of Count Claudio, Don Pedro's youthful favorite, Padua in that of Benedick, the prince's older and comically misogynistic companion.
Review, 4229 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |